


The Wrong Goddess

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Breast Fucking, Cunnilingus, Denial of Feelings, Dirty Talk, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Feeding Kink, Kitchen Sex, Mutual Pining, Office Sex, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Phone Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Pregnancy Kink, Pregnant Sex, Shaving Kink, Shower Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-06-22 20:42:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15590319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: She knows he’s not foolish enough to believe this is anything more than what it is. He’s a means to an end, and she checked her feelings at the door.At least that’s what she’s telling herself.Or, the encounters we didn’t see between 4x04 and 4x05.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because we know Frank and Laurel briefly resumed their ‘sneaking around having really hot sex’ schtick for at least a couple weeks between 4x04 and 4x05, and it reminded me a lot of how they were in s1, so I Had To. Who doesn’t love raunchy sex with a side of mutual pining and suppressed feelings. 
> 
> This first lil chap is probably pretty tame compared to the next three I've already got written, if that gives you any clues as to what's to come. This will probably be around 7-8 chapters, but I'm not sure atm, so for now it's staying as ?.
> 
> Drop me a comment/kudo if you dig it!

~

 

Maybe there’s something in all of this  
I missed. But if it’s selfless  
love you’re looking for,  
you’ve got the wrong goddess.

\- Margaret Atwood, Sekhmet, the Lion-Headed Goddess of War

 

~

 

She’s sitting in the passenger side. He won’t look at her.

That, she knows, is intentional. In part to deprive her, ignore her, make her fidget in anticipation and press her sticky thighs together where she can feel the evidence of the round they’d gone hardly five minutes ago, right where he’s still sitting. In part because – well, he _is_ driving. Keeping his eyes on the road is necessary to do that without killing them both. It’s a solid front Frank is putting up, she’ll admit, but she can see it slipping as the seconds tick by and they hit what must be every single red light in the city. The forces of the universe seem to be conspiring against them.

It’s during an interminably long one that her composure finally breaks, a thousand little hairline fractures culminating at once to make her snap. She can see his eyes flicking over to look at her very quickly from time to time; she knows he’s watching her out of his periphery. He’s always watching her. And so she figures it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when she reaches over and rests her hand on his thigh, the worn denim of his jeans, squeezing gently. Asking. No – _demanding_. They’re bathed in deep crimson light from the stoplight above, but if they weren’t Laurel knows she would be flushed roughly the same color from head to toe.

He continues ignoring her, as pointedly as she’s ever been ignored, though she can see him swallow, his Adam’s apple giving that telltale bob. She huffs, annoyed – and this time, she changes tactics.

She takes hold of his wrist, pulling it from the center console where he’s rested his arm, and tugs it toward her. Into her lap. Down. Between her legs.

Down. Against her cunt.

She’s burning, soaking. That throb of desire in her that won’t quit as of late, like a second heartbeat. She feels her entire body differently, now. She swears she can feel her own pulse like she never used to be able to, feel every ounce of blood as it flows through her veins. It keeps her damn close to her boiling point, and she’s already miles past her breaking point; a dangerous combination – for him more so than for her. She _wants_ with an intensity that scares the shit out of her. She feels like a pressure cooker of a girl.

She’s noticed a change in Frank, since he promised to be there for her and she hiked her dress up around her hips and fucked him senseless behind the wheel. He’d been hesitant, far from suave. Something almost in the realm of awkward, like he was overwhelmed by the prospect of having her again, but now he’s settled back into that familiar old nonchalance, studied carelessness. Like he couldn’t give less of a shit she’s grabbed his hand and dragged it between her legs. Like he barely notices.

Frank doesn’t react, or flinch, or even acknowledge what she’s done. Instead, he just raises his eyebrows and tells her, point-blank, “If I have to pull over, you’re not gonna be able to walk for the next week.”

She shudders.

Above them, the stoplight blinks green.

 

~

 

They collide as soon as they step inside her building. It’s equal parts her pouncing on him and him yanking her against his body, not roughly but firmly, and before she can even come up for air, he’s tugged her beneath the stairwell into the shadows.

It feels familiar, there in the darkness with him. It feels _right_.

She hadn’t considered that fucking him in Wes’s old apartment on Wes’s old bed would be crossing a line even for her, an already certifiably terrible person. Looking at this from the outside perspective, everything about this is twisted. She was supposed to be the grieving, chaste, pregnant widow. The thought makes her skin crawl.

She was supposed to be a lot of things. Things she’ll never be, now.

That’s never been a role she has the capacity to play anyway. This right here, fucking Frank beneath a stairwell among the shadows and cobwebs, where any one of her neighbors could come along at any moment and discover them – this is who she really is, and so she fumbles for his zipper eagerly, not bothering with any pretense. She’s desperate and they both know it, more the whore than the Madonna these days. She feels like a slut.

_I'm a cheater, yes. And a slut and a bad person, and now a murderer._

Well. A leopard can’t change its spots, now can it.

She can tell this is all a bit counterintuitive for Frank. He’s more inclined towards the whole body-worship routine, or at least he was after they got serious, and now she wants nothing more than just to be debased, not venerated. Not even anything remotely close. He’s still holding back and trying to be gentle, afraid of hurting her or the baby, but that’s the last thing she wants; she wants rough, raw. She can feel his come sticky on the insides of her thighs, mingled with her own wetness, and he feels it too when he slips his hand under her dress, gliding his fingers across her engorged clit, her swollen folds. She has to bite her lip to keep from moaning.

And then, for no reason at all, she feels him withdraw. She’s panting when he does, and immediately she gives a soft grunt of indignation, looking up to find him watching her with unnerving tenderness in his eyes.

“What’re we doin’, Laurel?” he rasps, and it’s the absolute _last_ question she wants to be asked right now.

Her hands start work again at his zipper. “Thought that was obvious.”

“No, I mean – what is this?” Frank’s eyes look almost silver in the moonlight, disturbingly clear, reading her like ultraviolet light. She has nowhere to hide from them. “You ‘n me.”

“You,” she breathes, “are going to fuck me so I don’t go all crazy hormonal pregnant lady and murder someone. Or jump Asher’s bones.” She finally succeeds in liberating his cock and pulls him closer, curling one of her legs around him. “Call it a… public service.”

“And what, exactly, do I get outta this?”

She almost laughs, like that should be obvious. “Me.”

There’s a long pause. The only sound to be heard is their labored breathing, the rustling of her dress as she shifts and squeezes her thighs together, in some effort to contain herself. Then, finally, something flicks on in his eyes, clouding them like smoke. He gives her a grin that’s positively feral.

“Fine,” he relents. “But I got terms.”

Before she can open her mouth to inquire what, _exactly_ , those terms are, he’s nudging her back against the wall, parting her legs, and cupping her over her sodden panties, feeling her drip into his palm. She can’t help but moan this time, face burning with arousal and a slight smattering of shame; for him to know how desperate she is, how bad she needs it. How little she can control it.

“Oh… fuck-”

“You need to get off? I want you comin’ all over my cock. My mouth. Fingers. Not anybody else’s. Not your own.” His grin widens. “You come to me.”

She feels herself grow even wetter, and she’s sure he feels it too – and hell, the look in his eyes, the lethally calm way about him, the way he says those things like he’s reciting something routine… She hasn’t seen this side of Frank, all wanton bravado and dominance, in ages. He seems completely in his element.

This is what she came for. What’ll _keep_ her coming.

“Excuse me?” she manages to pant, incredulous.

“You heard me. Those are my terms,” he purrs, stroking her clit over her panties with two fingers and drawing a mewl out of her she remembers to stifle about two seconds too late. “Take it or leave it. And-” He pauses, cocking an eyebrow. “I think we both know you’re not gonna leave it.”

He’s arrogant. He’s cocky. He’s a fucking asshole, and he’s right.

She’s not going to leave it.

In lieu of a verbal response, all Laurel does to signal her agreement is surge against him, kissing Frank almost savagely. Her heat is jackhammering inside her chest, her blood like magma, scorching her from the inside out. There’s no way to quell this ravenous hunger, this fucking _heat_ that’s descended on her. Bitch in heat – that’s what she is, as single-minded in her pursuit of pleasure as an animal, and when he finally yanks her skirt up, backs her into the wall, and presses his cock into her, she could swear she howls.

“ _Harder_ ,” she grits out almost immediately, and concern flickers across his face.

“I don’t wanna hurt-”

“Don’t,” Laurel growls, vicious. “Don’t mention the baby, just fuck me.”

She doesn’t want to be treated like a porcelain doll, coddled for fear she’ll break. She’s so goddamn tired of everyone’s caution around her she could scream, and luckily Frank has the good sense to throw that caution right out the window, complying and picking up the pace, until he’s fucking into her so hard it drives her against the wall, his thrusting a steady, rhythmic thump. They’re shockingly silent for all the pent-up tension she can feel in the air, a rubber band pulled tighter and tighter until it’s close to snapping. Every particle and cell in her body feels charged with electricity.

He feels perfect inside her; slick and enormous and blissfully bare, and she thinks it’s a good thing condoms aren’t a necessity for her in her current state because she doesn’t think she would have the available brain bandwidth to remember them anyway. She has one leg hooked around him, his hand gripping underneath her thigh to keep it elevated, give him better access. He has one hand anchored in her hair, little pinpricks of pain scattering across her scalp where he yanks it, and the pain and pleasure coalesce until her toes are curling and she’s going cross-eyed. His other hand is buried between her legs, working her clit to keep her building. He plays her body maddeningly confidently, as if getting her off is second nature to him. She thinks it probably is.

If she were a pressure cooker before, now she’s a stick of dynamite, fuse lit and rapidly burning. Red-faced and panting and shameless. Dress hiked up, sopping panties shoved to the side. She should feel humiliated to envision how she must look, but all that mental image does is turn her the fuck _on_.

This is her own twisted sort of paradise; rotten, decaying Eden. He’s the only person who’s ever understood that. The only one who’s ever been able to give it to her.

“Oh… ah, God-”

“Better keep quiet. Don’t want the neighbors hearin’ us,” he chides. She has no idea how his voice is so steady when he’s practically pummeling her. “Don’t wanna have to cover your mouth.”

Laurel swallows hard. She remembers covering his mouth hardly an hour ago in the car, muffling his moans as she rode him.

Only right that he should return the favor.

It’s frustrating how little control she has and how reliant on him to determine the pace she has to be, like this. If Laurel had her way, she’d push him to the floor, straddle him, pull up her dress, and ride him like she did in the car. She doesn’t have control over much in her life, the way her body grows and changes by the day, but she can, at least, control how she fucks. But she doesn’t dwell on it long; she’s so close her thoughts are splintering into pieces, dull and meaningless and the basest of the base, because she’s _so close, God, so close, so close_. All she can think of is how goddamn badly she needs to-

A low, almost inhuman sound escapes her when she finally falls to pieces around his cock. It’s deep, rumbling, a half-moan, half-something she doesn’t even know. It’s the most animal she’s ever sounded, and she doesn’t give a fuck if the entire _building_ hears her; she’s seeing stars, light-headed and shuddering with the force of her orgasm, and Frank is only working to prolong that, fucking her through it as the waves crest. Her entire body feels like gelatin. All the blood rushes from her head down south in a mass migration to her cunt.

For the briefest of moments, that all-consuming hunger is satisfied. Frank breaks her apart and puts her back together with careful hands, and when he comes himself it seems almost secondary to him. He spills hot inside her for the second time tonight, and she can feel herself dripping with it too, and she feels disgustingly filthy.

And she feels disgustingly _perfect_.

The air feels thick as they both come down, their exhalations heavy as humidity. They kiss, sloppily but not roughly, panting against each other’s mouths. She’s shaky and blubbering, not entirely capable of speech, but thank God Frank doesn’t try to talk to her – at least not at first.

There’re occasional flickers of warmth behind his eyes that unnerve her, the weight of unasked questions in his stare. She knows he’s not foolish enough to believe this is anything more than what it is. He’s a means to an end, and she checked her feelings at the door.

At least that’s what she’s telling herself.

“You good?” he asks, after a few minutes of silence, as he helps her smooth down her dress.

Better than good, she wants to say. Fucking perfect. But admitting that gives him power over her she’s not sure she wants him to have, because he already has more power than she’d prefer, and he knows it. All she does is nod, and without another word, Frank tucks himself away and goes to head for the door in the little lobby.

Laurel makes an almost canine whimper of confusion, furrowing her brow. “You’re not coming up?”

She tries to hide the disappointment in her voice and does an admittedly poor job. Frank stops, his silhouette in the moonlight almost otherworldly, like an incubus; a demon come to fuck her in the night before withdrawing when the sun rises.

“What happened to me not being able to walk for the next week?” she asks, a blatant challenge in her words. She tilts her head to one side, flaring her nostrils and raising her chin, as if daring a bull to charge.

For once in his life, Frank doesn’t rise to the bait.

“I didn’t have to pull over, now did I?” he quips, walking back over to her and settling his hands on her hips. He kisses her forcefully, with all the confidence of a man who knows full well he’s just gained the upper hand, before pulling away too soon, making her whine. “Get some sleep. You’re gonna be needin’ it.”

He says the words with that same deadly composure. They half-sound like a threat, and she knows they’re a promise. They make her throb all over again, and it’s like that that Frank leaves her, leaning up against the wall with quivering legs and damp thighs and kiss-bruised lips.

She has the faint realization that she may have just made a deal with the devil. If the services rendered weren’t so damn satisfactory, Laurel thinks she might be worried about that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hola friends, apologies for the delayed update. I was working on finishing this thing up and editing it as one big piece, and I've got like 3/4 of one last chap left, but decided to put this out anyway so I can get it all out before the s5 premiere. So, rest assured... this thing is finito!!
> 
> For anyone who likes fic mixes, I've made one for this fic [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/aghamora1/playlist/0fVwZkTJB5hFN4IwmVTw0J). Because Hurt You by The Weeknd is just so Flaurel it hurts.

“If you’re coming in, keep your hands to yourself. I have to be at the office in an hour.”

Frank flicks on the shower, which squeals as it comes to life, and steps in behind her with a grin. “Aye aye cap’n.”

They’re both soaked in sweat and each other; the scent of Laurel and the taste of her lingers thick and sweet like honey on his tongue. He lost track of how many rounds they went after the third or fourth.

At this rate, he thinks he’s going to need to invest in a Costco-sized bottle of Viagra to keep up with her. She’s downright fucking relentless.

And all he wants is another few precious minutes with her. Another second. An entire lifetime. Everything. _Anything_. So he follows her inside like a dog, letting the spray of the showerhead soak him and watching as it does the same to her. She’s resplendent fully nude, her belly a burgeoning curve beneath her breasts, arcing into her pelvis. Swollen breasts and wider hips and all her new, perfect, mesmerizing curves; the scent of her, the taste of her, the silken softness of her skin. The way she practically glows. She’s a continuous revelation. She’s different and the same and so fucking hot like this he can’t seem to keep his hands off her.

She can’t, either. After that night in the car, he knew they were both screwed, like alcoholics on a bender, addicts relapsing on each other.

Sex is a relatively harmless addiction, he figures.

Laurel herself? Maybe not so much.

“You sure it’s gonna be me not keepin’ my hands to myself?” he teases as Laurel wets her hair, droplets of water spilling down her décolletage, between her breasts. He steps closer, smirking. “We been fucking like rabbits and you’re still horny as hell.”

Her own smile is coy. “And who said I’m still horny?”

“You’re breathin’ fast,” he murmurs, voice like velvet, and moves in close, pressing himself against her from behind. “Pupils are dilated. Nipples are hard. Can’t stop eyein’ me over your shoulder…”

_I can just read your body. Those goosebumps on your neck, how fast your heart's pounding, and now you want me to kiss you… slow, deep, my tongue moving down your neck, chest, stomach, all the way ‘til I'm under that skirt-_

He hears her breath hitch, but she plays it off well with an eye roll for effect. “That’s very presumptuous of you.”

“I’m not presumin’ anything,” he chuckles into her ear, as his hands come up to rest on her hips. “Just observin’.”

“You think so highly of yourself,” she scoffs, and the words transport him to what feels like another lifetime. He doesn’t think she says them unintentionally. “I have to get to work, Frank, stop.”

He relents with a sigh, unaccustomed to being rebuffed as of late, and steps away, lathering himself in soap while Laurel squirts a dollop of his shampoo into her palm. She’s turned away from him, facing toward the spray of the shower, and he watches her in silence, eyes drinking in the slope of her plump ass, the jut of her shoulder blades, the smooth flesh of her back, all wet and gleaming. She moves as if unaware that he’s even there – but she is, he knows she is. She’s never _not_. She always was the observant one, and if he’s observing the signs of want in her, he knows she’s doing the same, not needing to turn to read him.

He feels so distant from her, right then, even though they’ve been fucking for hours. Even though they fucked all night and the night before. He’s with her but not _with_ her. He wants to talk to her, be there for her. Laurel’s idea of ‘being there for her’ is more along the lines of ‘letting her use him as her hormone-relief sex slave,’ and he’s not about to complain about that but-

He wants more of her. He wants all of her. He wants so much he doesn’t think he can find the words for it. He wants things he knows full well she isn’t ready to give.

So, because he’s a masochistic SOB, always has been, he’ll settle for just this.

He’s lost in his own mind for a while, until he hears Laurel make a sound suddenly; a soft, exasperated grunt. He finds that she’s taken his razor and coated one of her legs in shaving cream, straining to bend over and reach said leg, and ostensibly failing repeatedly with the obstacle of her stomach in the way.

Laurel straightens her back and huffs, clenching her jaw. He can tell she’s embarrassed, face reddened lightly. “Dammit. This is ridiculous.”

Without thinking, Frank holds out his hand.

“Here. I’ll do it.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I don’t need-”

“C’mon,” he urges, reaching out to take hold of the razor, and she lets him, though still seemingly reluctant. “Lemme take care of you.”

Laurel scoffs, but softens somewhat. “I don’t need taking care of.”

“I know,” he concedes, eyes locked on hers as he sinks to his knees before her. He’s never known anyone who needed taking care of _less_ than Laurel Castillo. “But it’s nice sometimes, ain’t it?”

She sighs and caves at last. “Hands to yourself still applies.”

He winks. “Of course.”

That’s the last rule he intends to abide by, if he’s intending to abide by any, and Laurel knows that; he’s predictable enough, like an animal that will single-mindedly pursue a carrot dangled in front of it. When he’s on his knees and presented with a fully naked Laurel, he doesn’t have much on his mind besides how he’s going to fuck her and how loud he can make her scream given their current location, but he manages to redirect most of his brainpower to the task at hand: lathering shaving cream in his hand, smoothing it up and down her leg, and dragging the razor carefully after it, leaving swaths of bare skin in its wake. He works diligently, gliding the razor over the curvature of her knees and backs of her calves, careful never to scrape her. The blades are fine and sharp; he uses the same razor to shave his face, and he feels himself stir at the thought.

He works in an almost worshipful way, like a conservator restoring a masterpiece and beholding it at the same time, marveling at what exists beneath his fingertips. He’s seen her shave before a dozen times and listened to her complain about doing so a thousand more; he’d never imagined how intimate doing something so mundane could feel. More intimate than she thought she signed up for, he’s sure.

Still, she’s mostly relaxed beneath his hands, easing off the gas and letting him take the wheel for once, even if there’s a hint of tension in her frame he’s never able to work out of her entirely. She needs to be taken care of once in a while, he thinks, because she seems to have forgotten how to let herself be.

And he wants to. He wants to so fucking badly. He makes no secret of it, and he thinks it scares her shitless. Hell, it still scares _him_ shitless sometimes, but he knows a defense mechanism when he sees one, and he knows, at least for now, not to push it.

When Frank finishes her left leg, he moves onto her right, coating it with the foam and then shaving it away, catching the fine hairs that’ve sprouted there. His eyes flick up to look at her from time to time, and he finds her watching him from above, biting her lip. Almost imperceptibly, he can feel her tightening her legs, trying to close them, because her thighs are splayed slightly to allow him access and it’s clear she wants him – and maybe _herself_ – to know it is limited access only. If her nipples were hard before, they’re harder now, swollen into firm, dark peaks, even under the warm spray of water. She’s breathing fast, slipping.

He just continues, silent and servile, like he doesn’t notice any of it. When he finishes her legs and upper thighs, his eyes creep higher, to his prize: her mound, which he can tell needs shaving too. Frank glances up at her in search of permission and finds her panting audibly, eyes wide with the realization of what he’s after.

“Frank…”

His name comes out as a half-baked, perfunctory warning. She isn’t fooling anyone, and she doesn’t even seem to be trying to anymore, feigning reluctance only because she believes she should. He shrugs, feigning innocence right back.

“What? Might as well finish the job while you got me down here.”

He wants to laugh, and he sees equal amusement bloom in her eyes. Of all his reasons for wanting this, convenience sure as hell isn’t one of them.

Laurel doesn’t bother pretending to hesitate any longer. Instead, she releases a breath and widens her stance, leaving her mound exposed fully to him from his vantage point below. He urges her to raise one of her legs and drape it over his shoulder, and she complies, and for a moment all he can do is stare at the sight revealed to him between her legs.

He can tell she’s drenched and not from the shower water, folds puffy, glistening. Her clit is swollen. Her wet little cunt stands out against her pale skin, so close he can already taste her. She always seems to be wet, these days, ensnared in a permanent state of arousal. If it weren’t for the sad reality of refractory periods and her work/school obligations, he doesn’t think they’d ever stop fucking.

It’s probably going to legitimately become a problem, if it isn’t already. But he’s had worse ones.

Frank reaches up, cupping her between her legs with a handful of shave cream and spreading it slowly. He isn’t directly touching her clit, but she rocks her hips regardless, gnawing on her lip so hard it looks liable to bust open. He’s even more careful with this section of skin, the swell of her outer folds, the creases of her thighs where her hair grows in thin patches.

She’s so sensitive that he knows she’s feeling everything, every microscopic pass of the razor across her skin drawing a shudder out of her. Her entire body is already infinitely more responsive and sensitive than it used to be, and he delights in learning her new favorite places, the places that’d never done anything for her before but now can drive her mad with a single touch. He can tell she feels vulnerable like this, all spread open and displayed, and the last thing he wants to do now is hurt her when he’s finally gotten her to relax, so he goes slow and as steady as his hands can manage, even though he’s trembling with the force of his desire.

He moves deliberately, shaving away her dark, stubbly hairs and leaving her bare. It’s necessary agony to go so slow, and Laurel is watching him with a lust-clouded haze in her eyes, one hand on her swollen stomach, other braced against the wall, breasts rising and falling rapidly with each breath; plump and round and so fucking delectable right then he can feel his mouth begin to water.

She’s going to smell like him, after this, his shaving cream and shampoo; pine and musk and earth. Her hair and her cunt and legs, all of her. _His_. It sends a throb of desire through him, cock already at attention and curving up toward his stomach, toward her. She’s letting him do this, letting him shave her bare so he can devour her, fuck her until she’s seeing stars. He’ll do both. Laurel bites back what sounds like a strangled whimper, right then, as he drags the razor lower, near her folds, and it almost makes him lose it completely.

But he’ll be damned if he doesn’t finish what he started.

When he’s finally done, Frank lets the razor drop to the ground. For the longest moment in the world, he doesn’t move a muscle, just kneels there watching her, and Laurel peels her eyes open to look at him, confused and clearly having expected something more; a next step, a progression of some sort. She’s like a vision, one leg hooked over his shoulder, goosebump-covered and slick and fucking perfect, everything he could ever want.

She looks like she’s going to say something. But then he drops his jaw, pries her thighs apart as far as they can go, and attacks before she has the chance.

He doesn’t start slow, tease or suckle her clit or build up to anything. He surges against her at full force, devouring her pussy without relent, and he feels her entire body jerk at the sudden onslaught. He’s brutal, punishing. Greedy. He can’t get enough of the taste of her, the sweetness of her juices as they spill down the sides of his mouth, pussy freshly shaved, ripe as a peach for the picking and ten times as delicious. Laurel sways on her feet, teetering, but he steadies her quickly and anchors his hands on her thighs.

“God – fuck,” she sputters, throwing her head back. “I thought… we agreed – _ah_ , thought we agreed… hands to yourself.”

He furrows his brow, as if his obedience should be obvious. “Not usin’ my hands, am I?”

He's spent the past decade under Annalise looking for legal loopholes and exploiting them whenever possible. He doesn't see why he can't apply that skillset here, too.

Laurel looks like she starts to say something more, but then he wraps his lips around her clit and puts his mouth to better use, and the words die right there on her tongue. Her cunt burns against him; he can feel her shake and shiver, each of her tremors passing over his tongue and driving him on as he laps her up like his last meal, his first meal, some rare delicacy he’s never tasted before and intends to gorge himself on. Normally he’d play her body and draw this out, but she comes from the sheer roughness alone hardly a second later, falling apart under his tongue. She comes easier than she used to, he thinks, so easy it’s like pulling one tiny thread and watching an entire garment unravel in seconds.

He wants to unravel her, over and over and over. As many times as she’ll let him – and he’s guessing that’s going to be _a lot_.

She explodes with all the force of a supernova, so intensely it half-startles him, like she’s going to collapse in on herself and take him down with her. She’s making sounds he’s never heard before, too; guttural, animalistic, something almost like a _brr_ , like she’s freezing cold. She’s shuddering like she is, pawing at her tits and grabbing at his hair and then the wall behind her, groping at everything for leverage and finding none.

He doesn’t stop. He doubles down on his licking, alternating pressure and suction on her clit in a way he barely has to think about, like playing a song he knows by heart. He fucks into her with his tongue and drinks down her juices and grazes his teeth lightly across her clit, and he can feel her trying to pull away, escape from the overstimulation, crying out _Oh God, no, fuck, I can’t_. He only pins her down and keeps going, because she _can._

Finally, he grants her a reprieve, after she’s come the second or third time. He wasn’t keeping score. Time blurs when he’s with her. It’s all in fast-forward and simultaneously in slow motion; it ceases to matter altogether.

Frank rises to stand with a wince, his knees aching, and kisses her on the mouth, slipping his tongue past her lips. She’s still unsteady, wobbling when he lets her leg down, but kisses back hungrily, moaning when she tastes herself on his tongue, his beard, realizing how she’d drenched him. He runs his hands over her body, palming her breasts and cupping them. She’s soft and supple, all of her, growing more so by the day, and when he pulls away to look her in the eyes, he’s expecting her to look spent.

She’s just staring back, completely alert. Because she isn’t done.

“See?” Frank quips, breathless against her lips. “Kept my hands to myself.”

Laurel scoffs but doesn’t reply – not at first. For no real reason, Frank inches back somewhat, allowing himself a moment just to look at her up close; a luxury he doesn’t get often. There are droplets of water dripping from the tip of her nose, beading on her cheeks. Her hair is damp and stringy, and her eyes swallow him like whirlpools. They pull him under, keep him there, and he’s so far in over his head by now that there’s never going to be any coming up for air. He’s fixated on the rosy curve of her lips, the cut of her cheekbones, the strength in the set of her jaw. Her cheeks are filled in more than he remembers; he hadn’t noticed until he’d seen her up close, and it looks good on her. She’s so beautiful.

He loves her, and she nixed love as a variable in this equation, and he didn’t.

And he’s starting to realize that’s going to become a problem, too.

“Yeah right,” Laurel finally remarks, breaking the spell. “God, you’re an asshole.”

Frank blinks and then recovers, pecking her hard on the mouth. “Name calling’s gonna stop, y’know.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” he chides, mock-serious, lowering his voice until it rumbles. It shoots straight up her spine, he can feel it, because she looks momentarily worried. “Might just cut you off. And I don’t think you’d deal with blue balls real well right now. Now-” Frank steps back, all business all at once. “Am I fuckin’ you like this or are you gonna bend over for me?”

She just grins wickedly and turns, not bothering to pretend to hesitate this time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another update on the progress on this fic: it is donezo! I'm hoping to get it all published before s5 premieres on the 27th of this month, so it should be getting roughly 1-2 updates per week. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Drop me a comment to let me know you're enjoying this filth.

It’s only after she loses the third or fourth orgasm that she finally gives in and dials Frank’s number.

She’d like to consider herself pretty adept at masturbation. She knows her own body, the sweetest spots to touch, the right pace to go to make herself last just long enough and not a millisecond more. She gets herself off better and faster than ninety percent of the men she’s been with throughout her lifetime. Boys, really – not men. Entitled, clumsy prep school children of privilege who couldn’t locate a clitoris if she posted signs and drew an X to mark the spot.

_That fast, hard, make-your-toes-curl-sex those prep school boys never gave you-_

Frank’s voice plays in her head, and she switches off her rabbit vibe with an exasperated sigh, letting it tumble to the side on her bed. It almost seems to be mocking her, refusing to let her come out of spite, because she’d like to consider herself adept at masturbation – but tonight, it just isn’t _working_. She keeps building, over and over, but plateauing before she can reach that point of ecstasy, like an itch she can’t seem to scratch. It slips away, once then twice then three times, and by the fourth she’s growling in frustration, her naked body sweat-soaked, sprawled out on her sheets and uncomfortably hot.

She’s _burning_. Her cunt and clit and tits, all of her touch-starved. She stares down at her mound of a stomach with something like resentment, the source of her incorrigible sexual appetites these days, because it’s getting harder to reach around and constantly proves to be an obstacle, and if it’s going to cause so many problems, the least it could do is not prevent her from solving them herself.

There’s another solution to this. A tall, blue-eyed, bearded solution. She knows that.

She shouldn’t call. He’s LSAT prepping with Asher tonight. She knows that too.

Laurel compromises with herself by texting him instead, grabbing her phone and tapping out a simple:

- _Come over_

A minute passes, the message rocketing off into the digital stratosphere with a _whoosh_. For a split second, she’s worried he won’t answer, and she’ll be left high and very _not_ dry. But then-

- _I can’t tonight. Doucheface is giving me a practice test_

She huffs.

- _I need you_

She hates admitting that. But it’s true, and she suspects it just might work on him.

- _You’re distracting me, you know_

_-Good_

_-Laurel…_

_-Please_

He doesn’t respond, for a moment. Laurel messages him again, not bothering to mask her desperation.

- _You know how bad it gets_

_-And how bad is it?_

The moment she reads the message, she knows she has him. Laurel grins.

- _Call me. I’ll describe in vivid detail_

Another pause, longer this time, before her phone lights up with an incoming call, a banner flashing across the screen with his name. She remembers the old picture that’d used to be there instead, the shirtless selfie he’d taken and assigned to his own contact photo. She thinks she should probably get him to provide another one sometime in the near future.

For old time’s sake. And because there’s no such thing as too much spank bank material.

“Finally,” she breathes, sitting up and holding the phone to her ear. “Took you long enough.”

“This is a courtesy call, y’know,” Frank quips on the other end of the line. “I was in the middle of a reading comp section, had to go upstairs.”

“I still have my old LSAT practice books. If you come over, I could… help you study.”

Predictably, he sees right through that. “Yeah right. You’re gonna lure me over with the promise of tutoring and then try to fuck me.”

Laurel scoffs, as if offended. “I can tutor you by applying real-world situations to the LSAT. Formal logic, for instance. _If_ you come over… _then_ you’ll get laid. See? Necessary and sufficient. You coming over is the sufficient term, getting laid is the necessary one.”

Frank chuckles. “Look, I’m not saying I can’t be persuaded. But not tonight, I gotta finish this test.”

“Fine,” she relents at last, settling herself back down on the bed and spreading her legs, slipping a hand between them. “Then just… talk me through it. It won’t take long.”

“Won’t it now?”

She’s piqued his interest; she can hear the rough, gravelly rasp of want in his voice. The pitch of it drops down low enough to make her shudder, an electric thrill running up her spine and settling between her legs, into her clit.

“I promised vivid detail,” Laurel recalls teasingly. “What do you wanna know?”

He doesn’t take even a second to think.

“How wet’d you get yourself now?”

There’s a reprimanding note in his tone, like he’s talking to a child who’s made a mess, scolding her. _All right, what’ve you done now_. She swallows and reaches down to swipe her clit in lazy circles, letting his voice carry her away from this bed, this room.

“Dripping.” She licks her lips, throat achingly dry. “ _Soaked_.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “You touching yourself? What’re you usin’?”

She doesn’t, either. “Fingers.”

“Fingers?” He makes a sound of disbelief. “What, this your first rodeo or somethin’?”

“You know that’s not _all_ I’ve been using.”

“So you’ve been at this a while now.”

“So long.” Her voice breaks off into a needy whimper. She hates how damn needy she is. She knows _he_ loves it. “God, for-fucking- _ever_.”

“I thought I told you,” he chides, “to come to me first.”

Again, there’s that admonishment. It makes her stomach twist sinfully, the thought of being _bad_ , and she quickens the pace of her hand, rubbing herself in increasingly frantic circles, even if she knows she’s not going to come like this. It’s all slick on slick, no friction.

She needs more.

“I’m coming to you now,” Laurel breathes, the air feeling increasingly heavy around her, clinging to her skin like damp velvet. “And I haven’t been coming, for the record. I just… I can’t.”

“Oughta punish you for that.”

She doesn’t respond, can’t find the words to do so. All she does is whimper again and reach over for the discarded vibe beside her, because she can tell this is about to get _good_ , his voice all low and dark and dangerous. She switches it onto a lower setting, shifts to angle her hips, and begins to run the toy along the seam of her cunt, up to her clit, and then back down again, feeling the vibrations awaken her nerve endings and warm her up. Not that it takes much to do that, these days, and she’s already so sensitive she lets loose a low whine, just loud enough for him to hear.

Her voice is smaller than she wants it to be, sticking in her throat. “How?”

“Could take you over my knee. Tie you up. But-” he says conversationally. “Nah. I’d fuck you at your office. Right at your desk, in my lap. Middle of the day, with everyone watchin’.”

The idea is so mind-bendingly hot and simultaneously humiliating that her toes curl, and somehow the shame only intensifies her pleasure. Frank continues on, voice evenly-cadenced in a way it absolutely should not be while talking so explicitly.

“Everyone would see you, skirt all hiked up. Hear you. And you’d be loud, I’d make you be loud. They’d all know how desperate you are. How you’re wet under that dress all goddamn _day_.” Oh, God, his voice is like sex itself. She slips the rabbit vibe into her, the outside clitoral stimulator pulsing against her sensitive nub, and she almost comes undone in seconds. “They’d know that when you need to get off, you come to me. That I’m the one who breaks you off, makes you scream. Nobody else – just me. You’d ride my cock hard and fast and come all over it in front of everyone, and you wouldn’t care. You’d just beg me for more.”

Everyone at the DA’s office already watches her, most with derision; the stupid pregnant intern who only got her job because of nepotism and is bound to become useless and/or disappear completely once she pops out the kid. She knows perfectly well what they think of her; Bonnie, Denver, all of them. Imagining what they’d think of her if they saw _that_ -

God. She’s always had an exhibitionist streak in her. What an exhibit that would be.

“I don’t beg,” is all she can manage, and that’s a lie, and she knows he knows.

“Better start. You’re gonna be needing me around full time for the next few months.” He pauses. She can hear the grin bleeding into his voice, all smug and self-satisfied. “Tell me how bad it got tonight.”

“I just – my whole… body’s on fire, all the time.” She adjusts herself to get a better angle on the vibe, her belly proving itself to be an interference for the thousandth time, and she growls softly in frustration. “I can’t sleep. I’m so wet, I was going crazy all day-”

“First thing you did when you got home was yank your panties off and fuck yourself on your fingers, wasn’t it? Couldn’t wait any longer.”

She doesn’t know how he knows; he just _does_ , his gutter-minded intuition spot-on. Frank knows her better than she’d care to admit, but she plays coy, giving a shaky smile and squeezing her eyes shut as she feels herself build, a hot coil of pleasure tightening inside her.

“It’s not my first rodeo, remember?” She gives a sound that’s half-laugh, half-gasp. “Didn’t just use my fingers.”

“ _Fuck_ , Laurel…”

It’s the first crack in his composure she’s heard tonight, and if he isn’t hard by now, it’s a goddamn miracle of human anatomy. Something about the sound of her own voice drives her on, drives _both_ of them on, and she imagines him unzipping his jeans, taking himself in hand, building with her.

A waste, when he could be inside her. He’s so close and he might as well be halfway across the world.

“I’m so hot, all the time.” Laurel rocks her hips, listening to the obscene squelch of the vibe between her legs and the low, droning buzz. She’s so wet she’s spilling onto the sheets, dampening them beneath her. “It’s all I think about. You.” The rush of endorphins is loosening her tongue, and she feels hazy, drunk, wonderfully insane. “Fucking you is all I think about.”

She thinks she hears him stifle a groan. “You need it. Need to be filled, over and over, don’t you? You’re so desperate you can’t stand it. Already went and got yourself knocked up, and you still can’t get enough.”

She’s never been needy – not until this particularly libidinous cocktail of hormones took control of her. She hates needing anything from anyone, and she feels damn ridiculous running around fucking like crazy when she’s like this, when she should be doing any number of nice, normal, expectant mother things. Like yoga.

Laurel almost sputters a laugh. She’s doing her own version of yoga all right.

She feels ashamed of her desperation, and as much as she’s ashamed she’s also equally aroused by it, by the impulses that control ninety-nine percent of her decision-making processes these days, by her sheer utter _need_ , ashamed and shameless all at once. She’s like one giant live wire activated at all times. One huge raw nerve. Every bit of logic and rationality was chucked out the window fifty miles back on this freeway of debauchery and she’s not going back for it now.

If she’s having what is probably the best sex of her life, and _lots of it_ – well, really, she’s not going to complain.

“ _Yes_ ,” she hisses, continuing with her lazy thrusts of the toy but increasingly keeping it held up against her clit, letting it buzz her to climax. “Fuck, Frank, fuck you.”

Acting like this was all _her_ doing. Her own stupidity. She remembers the night he came back. She knows he does, too.

The possibility is still unspoken between them. If Laurel is going to stay sane, it’s going to stay that way.

“You’d like that right about now, wouldn’t you?” She opens her mouth to shoot something back, but he cuts her off before she can. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

Normally she’d hesitate, but she no longer gives a fuck about propriety, and she can’t pretend that she has any inhibitions. She’s having phone sex with her ex in her dead boyfriend’s apartment in her dead boyfriend’s _bed_ for God’s sake; she’s not going to pretend she’s a blushing virgin.

“My bunny vibe. I’m using… using that. You know that one.” She’s close. So close her entire body is seizing up and tensing, and she doesn’t know how he expects her to be able to _speak_. “I’m close – oh-” Her voice breaks off into something of a sob. “It’s so good but it’s n-not as good as you-”

“Use your words,” he coaxes. “Tell me.”

The pleasure is overtaking her senses, dulling her consciousness of the world around her; of anything but the vibe working steadily between her legs. She’s surrendering herself to it, thrusting the toy inside almost frantically now, hitting that blissful spot with as much force as she can, and that deeper pressure inside combines with the stimulation outside on her clit to drive her off the deep end. She feels like a grenade the pin has been pulled out of, only a matter of time before she detonates.

“I’m gonna… I’m so close-” she grinds out, low, throaty. She stares down at her heaving breasts, belly, the sight of her body and the knowledge of what she’s doing to herself intensely erotic. “God, I want you, I want your cock, I want to tie you to… my fucking bed and not let you _leave_ -”

She sounds uncharacteristically aggressive. She never used to be like this. She never used to _want_ with such fierce, ferocious intensity, like she’s a black hole, vibrating and swirling and consuming. She can never get enough. She could tie him to her bed like she said, never let him leave, fuck him over and over until he literally could not take it anymore – and somehow, she knows she would still want more.

“Make yourself come,” he orders. His voice cuts through her like winter wind. “ _Now_ , Laurel.”

It’s her name, of all things, that does her in. He almost growls it, and the order slices her down to her bones, finally topples her over that cliff face. She comes with his name on her lips, burying the vibe instead her as deep as it can go, her entire body going perfectly still for one heavenly second before the waves begin to crash over her, and she buckles beneath their force, battered by them. The surge of oxytocin is like liquor in her veins, and when she begins to come down she feels drunk, like she does when she’s started to lose her buzz to the inevitable creep of sobriety.

She got what she wanted. There’s a pleasant warmth coursing through her, a drone of contentment, and for a moment, the insatiable is satiated.

Not for long. But for now.

“Damn,” Frank remarks, voice like gravity, bringing her back down to earth. “When the hell’d you get such a filthy mouth?”

She switches off the vibe and tosses it away. “Come over and wash it out with soap. Invitation still stands.”

“I’ll take a rain check on that.”

They’re quiet for a moment, both catching their breath. She doesn’t know if he came too, if he even touched himself, but there’s something undeniably comforting about the sound of his breathing on the other end; the knowledge that, for once, she isn’t alone. She tries to shut the thought down, but it keeps coming back, stubborn.

Shit, she is so tired of being alone.

“Sorry I gave you blue balls tonight,” Frank says at last, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow.”

Laurel snorts. “You better.”

Neither of them wants to hang up, she can tell. This is edging far too close to territory she isn’t comfortable in, like sappy lovesick teenagers staying up late on the phone together under the covers to see who’ll hang up first, but thankfully, Frank ends the silence himself before she’s forced to, almost as if he senses her discomfort.

“Go easy on yourself tonight,” he warns. “’Cause I’m not gonna go easy tomorrow.”

The line goes dead before she can say a word.


	4. Chapter 4

The DA’s office buzzes with activity like a hive.

He’s reminded of his hatred for the place the moment he steps in the door, pushing past mindless worker bee in shirtsleeves after mindless worker bee in shirtsleeves as he makes his way down the main hallway. He’s spent nearly his whole career squaring off against the DA in Annalise’s corner, and he knows from experience half of the people here are riding high horses so tall they can’t even see the damn ground. It’s all one massive circle jerk of white-hats and moral integrity. It gives him hives.

But he pays the people no attention, navigating his way through the building like a Laurel-seeking missile. He isn’t exactly sure what he’s doing here, really; he strongly suspects she’s going to be pissed at him for coming to her work unannounced. But he wants to see her.

It’s like the equivalent of a boyfriend sending a flower delivery to her desk, he rationalizes. Only he’s not her boyfriend, and he’s delivering himself for other, much less innocent purposes.

Frank finally arrives at the end of the hallway where it opens up into a large main hub full of desks with offices surrounding the perimeter. It only takes him a moment to locate Laurel, slaving away over a stack of paperwork at a desk in the corner with twin spots of color on her cheeks and a frown on her face. She’s wearing a black dress with a blazer over it, her go-to these days it seems, and even under the blazer he can see the way it clings to her curves, pulled tight across her breasts in a way that doesn’t seem very office-appropriate at all. He can tell she’s too engrossed in whatever she’s doing to notice him any time soon, and so he pulls out his phone, typing out ‘ _Digging the LBD’_ with a smirk and hitting send.

A minute passes. Then, across the room, Laurel furrows her brow and takes hold of her phone, swiping to unlock it and reading the message. Her mouth drops open as soon as she does, eyes darting around the room until they finally land on him. She shoots to her feet and rushes over as soon as they do, eyes saucer-wide as she mouths, _What the_ hell?

Okay. So. Definitely not happy to see him.

Laurel grabs his arm none-too-gently and tugs him over to a nearby janitorial closet, pulling him inside with her. She’s surprisingly strong for someone so tiny, and he winces, rubbing his upper arm where she’d grabbed it as she shuts the door and yanks the pull chain to switch on the single lightbulb over their heads.

“Frank, what the hell-” She cuts herself off, exhaling sharply. She’s in heels, at least three-inch ones, and they make her taller, elongate her legs. He can’t stop staring. “What the _hell_ are you doing here?”

“Wanted to come visit you,” is his simple answer. “Take you out to lunch. Or-” He grins. “For a little afternoon delight. Gotta say, this isn’t quite the welcome I was expecting.”

“You can’t just – you can’t just _show up_ here, what if Bonnie had seen-”

“She didn’t,” he soothes her. “Relax. I had a plan B if she did.”

“You’re-” Laurel sputters, clearly shaken but slowly simmering down. “You can’t just do stuff like this. I need this job.”

“I won’t get you fired,” he murmurs and moves closer. Surprisingly enough, she lets him draw her against him, and when she breathes out and he places his hands on her hips, he can feel the tension leave her little by little, in a slow pinhole leak. “Promise.”

They stay still for a moment. In the dimly lit closet, she isn’t easy to see, but up close he can still see the color in her cheeks, the indentations on her lower lip from where she must have been digging her teeth into it at her desk. She’s breathing fast, gazing at him through heavily-lidded eyes, and it could be from storming over to grab him so quickly, but he knows her better than that.

He can read her body. He has every line of her and all her subtle nuances memorized perfectly. If she was breathing hard from the exertion, there wouldn’t be that faint stutter between breathes. She wouldn’t be licking her lips and swallowing to wet her throat like it’s gone dry as cotton.

“There should be some kinda law against looking this hot at the office, y’know,” he teases, feeling her melt against him and go pliant beneath his palms. “Gonna be distracting people.”

Laurel scoffs. “Nobody’s ogling me these days, believe me.”

“Don’t know why.” He lowers his lips to her ear, and she tries not to shiver, steeling herself, but he manages to get one out of her anyway. He moves back, mouth hovering over hers, so hopelessly caught in her gravity he couldn’t pull away even if he tried. “Can’t keep my damn eyes off of you.”

Closer, now. He’s breathing her oxygen, and she isn’t moving away. When Laurel smiles, he’s so close he can feel her lips quirk up against his. “Got some kind of fetish?”

Maybe. He loves the way she looks. He doesn’t understand it. He’s also not going to bother denying it.

He just wants to fucking _devour_ her.

“Guilty as charged.”

Laurel gulps. He swears she flushes one whole shade darker. “What’re you here for, Frank?”

He shrugs. “I know it gets bad during the day. I’m here to take a load off.”

“Is this some kind of… gigolo delivery service?”

“If you want it to be.” He presses his lips down on hers, so gently it’s nothing more than a ghosting. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”

When he finally kisses her properly, she opens like a flower, parting her lips to let his tongue slip inside and deepening the kiss immediately. She moans against his mouth when he traps her lower lip between his teeth gently, and in the blink of an eye he sees something switch on in her; that ravenous, volatile side of Laurel, ignited so easily, like dropping a match in the puddle of gasoline. She unfurls, shedding her veneer of indignation and giving herself over completely to her desires, because he knows, deep down, all along, she _was_ happy to see him.

“You need a good fuck,” he purrs, sucking at her pulse point. “And I’m more than willing to provide. Let me.” He nips at her neck, hard enough to leave a mark and make her gasp. “Provide.”

Frank reaches down, groping between her legs. And the moment he does, he freezes.

Instead of lace or cotton like he’d been expecting, his hand meets only smooth, bare flesh. Her thighs are soaked. She’s dripping straight into his palm. No underwear. No thong. Not even the pretense of modesty. Nothing.

_Jesus fucking Christ._

Frank raises his eyebrows, somehow biting back his groan. “You goin’ commando at the office now?”

Her eyes glitter with desire. Her hair is mussed, lips swollen and red and wet from kissing him. She’s flushed from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, hungry for his kisses and hungry for his cock and hungry for a fucking, and she’s paradise. He wants to lose himself inside her.

“Maybe.” Laurel licks her lips, and he watches her tongue trace them, stares at the sheen of dampness it leaves behind. “Maybe… when it gets really bad, I go into the bathroom and get myself off.”

“You’re-” He doesn’t know what to stay. He’s speechless. “Jesus, you’re dirty as hell, aren’t you? Damn nympho.”

He slides two thick fingers into her, pressing her back up against a shelf with an array of cleaning products and hooking them in a come-hither motion. An aerosol can of something goes tumbling to the floor with a metallic clunk, but he can’t hear anything over the soft sounds she’s making into his mouth, whimpers and sighs and little kitten-mewls, light and airy like psalms against his lips.

Laurel manages a shaky laugh. “You love it.”

_I love you_. He catches the words before they can make their way out. They don’t have a place here, no matter how badly he wants them to.

“You’re never gonna need underwear with me,” he growls all at once, startling even himself. Her lithe hands bunch his jacket up in her hands, slowly maneuvering it off of him, but he grabs hold of them and pins them back, and she gasps. “I’ll bend you over your desk. Over the bathroom sink. Everywhere. As long as I’m around you’re never gonna need to close your damn _legs_.”

“God,” she hisses as he brings his fingers to her clit. She’s panting hard, squealing and writhing against him. “Oh, God, yes-”

He doesn’t make her come right away, though with the state she’s in, he suspects it wouldn’t take much to do just that. He wants to draw this out, deny her, and once upon a time Laurel would’ve played along, but now, she has no patience for delayed gratification. All at once, he feels her positioning her hands against his chest and giving a firm shove, enough to wrench him off of her and send him stumbling backward several steps.

For a moment he just looks at her, all the wind knocked out of him, and she looks like a madwoman, pupils so wide in the dim light that her eyes look entirely black from this angle. Her black dress pulls tight across her swollen midsection, her breasts. Her feet are firmly planted in her heels, and she’s breathing hard, almost snarling, nostrils flared like a bull about to charge. Feral.

All he can do is stare. And then-

“Lay down,” she orders, in a tone that lets him know this is not up for debate. Nothing really is anymore, when it comes to her.

He cocks his head to one side. “’Scuse me?”

“Lay down, I wanna ride you.”

Well. At least she makes no secret of what she wants.

Frank almost laughs and sinks to the concrete floor, smirking on the way down. “Well, when you put it like that-”

There’s no long drawn out transition and no further discussion, no guesswork on his end. All at once she’s just sinking down onto his lap without another word, effectively shutting him up. It takes a moment for them to find a comfortable position with her stomach occupying the space between their bodies, and it’s a bit awkward, but once they have, his hands creep up to tear off her blazer, then reach behind to unzip her dress. The fabric falls forward and crumples around her waist, revealing a black lace bra beneath, and he’s about to remove that too when Laurel pushes him down the rest of the way so that he’s lying flat on his back, a silent signal that she’s finished being disrobed.

From his position, he can’t do much. All he can do, he supposes, is buckle up and enjoy the ride.

She makes short work of his belt and zipper, and he chuckles as she draws his cock out greedily. “Slow down, killer.”

“Can’t wait,” is all she hisses. “I need you.”

He’s about to say something when Laurel bunches her dress up around her hips, lines herself up, and sinks down without preamble. She takes his cock with practice, like she was made to do it, like he was made for her too, and immediately all coherent thought disappears into a mind-blistering abyss, a world that consists only of Laurel: Laurel’s sopping cunt around him and Laurel’s weight atop him and the sight of Laurel as she rides him, which is something to behold in itself. She’s his entire universe, for a moment, all soft curves and warm red flesh, lips parted with silent moans, lips he wants to kiss and do other unspeakable things to. Fucking him with her heels still on. She’s in control and composed outwardly, and yet she lets him be the one to undo her.

And what a sight an undone Laurel is.

All he can do is stare as she finds her pace, first rolling her hips and then beginning to work herself up and down. He reaches up, trying to help her, massage her clit, anything, but she smacks his hand away and does it herself, and he almost has to laugh. She’s always been headstrong, self-sufficient to a fault. He suspects she despises needing him the way she does; the least she can do is finger her own damn clit.

“Oh, yeah.” Her voice is low and tremulous, and she tilts her head back, reaching up to paw at her breast over her bra. When she grows frustrated with the lack of sensation, she tugs it out and kneads it roughly. “Oh, _fuck_ …”

She isn’t looking at him. She has her eyes closed, as a matter of fact, and he wonders if that’s a conscious choice, because he knows the truth: he’s just a cock to her. A mouth. Hands. A glorified human dildo. He wants to be more, so much more, but he’s content with this, too, if this is all she can give him for now.

Or at least he can pretend to be.

He reaches up to grip her hips and guides her down roughly onto him, canting his own hips up at the same time to meet her movements. He can see where they’re joined, his cock glistening with her wetness as it slips in and out of her, as she forces him to bottom out, like she can never get him quite deep enough. He reaches out and he can feel it, feel where her cunt stretches to take him, and if he weren’t aware of the necessity of letting Laurel come first, he almost might fall to pieces right then and there.

He can feel his orgasm reaching critical mass under his skin. He needs to come, but he needs _her_ to come first, and he can tell she’s close; she’s almost slamming onto him, over and over, teeth gritted, face sweaty with exertion. She’s riding him so hard she could break his back and probably also his pubic bone on the unforgiving concrete, shamelessly chasing her own pleasure, fingers swiping at her clit. He’d be a liar if he said seeing her need him so badly didn’t turn him on, if watching her use herself on him like a toy wasn’t the goddamn hottest thing he’s ever seen in his life.

He already is a liar. But only to himself, these days.

When she comes Laurel bites her tongue so hard he’s worried she’s going to chomp it clean off, crying out silently, nothing more than a faint croak; she’s nothing if not good at being discrete. She clenches around his cock like a vice and trembles so hard he can feel the spasms travelling through him too, and it’s like one giant chain reaction after that, dominos felling one another in a row. He follows suit hardly seconds later, coming with her, and the sensation is so white-hot he can’t take it, the feeling of her milking his cock for every last drop, as starving as she is. Like it needs to be fucked, filled, over and over. He will. It’s all he wants to do.

She’s made him as voracious as she is. She’s made him insane.

“Jesus,” he chokes out, as Laurel falls forward with both hands braced against his chest. She’s weak, swaying. She looks thoroughly wrecked – as she should. “Fuck.”

He wants to tell her she’s beautiful, but he isn’t articulate enough right then to do so. She’s a vision in the faint lamplight, all disheveled and sweaty with one breast pulled out of her bra and a faint bite mark growing darker by the second on her neck, and if she covers it he’ll give her another, and another, decorate her neck until she can’t cover them anymore. She isn’t saying anything. She half-looks like she might start drooling at any second now, fucked halfway to hell and back. She can’t quite seem to catch her breath either, and so he reaches up, smoothing a few wayward strands of hair behind her ear to ground her, bring her back to him.

Something along the lines of recognition flickers in her eyes, breaking through the haze. Dare he say it: something close to tenderness. He’s always high as a kite on the afterglow, but Laurel doesn’t seem similarly enchanted and instead rises to stand, tottering on unsteady knees, as if jolted back to reality by the brush of his fingertips. She leans against one of the shelves until she can support her weight on her own, and in the time that takes, he rises to his feet as well, zipping up his jeans, then helping her zip up the back of her dress. He puts her back together as carefully as he took her apart, cherishing the softness of this moment.

“Should make this a regular thing,” Laurel jokes, as she slips her arms into the sleeves of her blazer. She’s a mess, smudged lipstick and wild hair and wrinkled dress, and there’s no way no one outside will notice. He wonders if the idea thrills her like it thrills him. “Switch over from a midafternoon caffeine bump to a… midafternoon sex bump.”

Frank chuckles. “Good to know I’m at least better than coffee.”

“Of course you are,” Laurel kisses him sloppily, slurring the words. She’s lust-drunk and can’t walk straight, although he knows that’s at least partially because of him. “I don’t have to have you in moderation.”

They remain there like that for a moment, and then Frank pulls away, reaching over for a roll of paper towels and grabbing one. He proffers it to her to clean herself up with – between her legs, because he knows she’s soiled there – but much to his surprise, Laurel just shakes her head, unconcerned.

“No. I wanna feel you. All day,” she tells him with a minxish grin and a toss of her hair. “I’ll text you tonight.”

He can’t be entirely sure he’s not having a heart attack when the door closes behind her. But if anyone is going to be the one to finally kill him, he thinks it’s only right that it should be her.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the dirtiest chap of this whole thing.
> 
> Enjoy you filthy hoes.

Frank is sweaty and inexplicably shirtless like something out of a bad porno when he comes to the door.

She isn’t expecting it, and her eyes drop down to his bare chest within seconds, chiseled and gleaming in the sunlight. She won’t accept fault for that; nope, no sir, it’s the hormones. She can’t be held responsible for what they make her do. She’s not guilty by reason of insanity.

He’s also really, ludicrously, stupidly ripped. It’s ridiculous. It’s unnecessary, frankly. It’s…

So unbearably _hot_ she could jump his bones right this second.

“My eyes are up here, y’know,” Frank teases, and when he does, she knows this was entirely on purpose.

Laurel snorts. “Don’t flatter yourself. And is there a reason you’re not wearing a shirt?”

“Doin’ some lifting,” is all she gets by way of response, as he steps to the side. “Got a few more reps to go in this set, I’ll be done in a minute.”

That’s gym rat jargon she doesn’t know the meaning of and doesn’t care to; she came here to get laid, not fit. But Laurel only rolls her eyes and follows him into Bonnie’s sunny living room where he’d set up his weights, watching as he picks a pair of sizable dumbbells up off the rug. She folds her arms once more with an exaggerated humph and leans sideways against the wall as Frank draws the weights up closer to his chest, holding them there for a moment. When he lets them drop back down with a grunt of effort, Laurel just rolls her eyes again.

If he’s trying to seduce her, it’s working. If he’s trying to rub it in, it’s _also_ working, because she’s about twenty pounds heavier than she used to be, gaining by the day, very out of shape with a freaking basketball shoved inside her stomach, and she doesn’t appreciate this.

“You knew I was coming,” she tells him impatiently. “This couldn’t wait until later?”

Frank shrugs in the midst of a lateral raise. “You’re getting pretty hard to keep up with. Gotta make sure I get my workouts in. ‘Sides, helps to get the adrenaline flowin’.”

_Yeah, for both of us._

She stomps out the thought like a roach. Despite her best efforts, though, she’s momentarily distracted by the rippling of his biceps, bulky but not cartoonishly so, veins snaking down them and bulging as he pumps the weights. Her eyes move horizontally to his pecs, then his abs, all similarly sculpted and well-defined, shimmering like they’ve just been rubbed with goddamn baby oil and so toned it’s-

It’s annoying. This is _all_ annoying. He’s already an Adonis; he doesn’t need to waste her precious lunch hour showing off when he could be using much more useful body parts to do much more useful things. She is not going to play right into his hands like he wants.

“Okay, this-” She shakes her head, irritatingly aroused and fighting it as best she can. “This is just gratuitous.”

He pauses in his movements to give her a wry grin. “Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”

Laurel grinds her molars. “Put down the damn dumbbells, Frank, I’ll give you a workout.”

“Oh, I know you will,” he remarks with a chuckle and turns away from her, resuming a biceps curl. “Almost done. Patience is a virtue.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a virtuous person.”

She can’t see his face, but she can feel him smirking again, somehow. “I know that too.”

She hates being ignored, and so does her libido, but as Laurel stands there and stares at him in silence, she doesn’t think she’s being ignored at all, in fact. If anything, this is some sort of musclehead peacocking for her benefit, a display of masculinity to rile her up – but she’s only genuinely interested in one half of the word _peacock_ when it comes to Frank, and she doesn’t need him to work at getting her riled up. ‘Riled up’ is pretty much her default setting these days.

She isn’t dense enough to fall for this. But she’s certainly horny enough to, and he knows that.

Laurel shifts and crosses her legs unconsciously, licking her lips. She’s grateful he’s facing the other way because it gives her leave to thirst unashamedly, dragging her eyes over his body, across his broad shoulders and the thick, corded muscles in his back, the harsh planes of his hips where they disappear just beneath the waistband of his sweatpants. Laurel could swear every single one of his back muscles is visible; ones she never even knew existed, bumps and ridges surrounding the snaking valley of his spine. He’s a mountain of a man.

She’ll admit she isn’t often focused on admiring Frank’s physique when Frank is busy doing things of a sexual nature to her, but it occurs to her right then that he almost doesn’t look real. He looks like a marble carving someone wrapped human skin around. Perfect. Powerful.

She really just wants to run her tongue over his entire body, but he and his ego don’t need to know that.

He’s only just finished and set down the dumbbells when she’s upon him, suddenly, with all the force of a tsunami making landfall. She doesn’t waste time. She wants her hands all over him, wants to touch him until she’s weathered away all his sharp edges, wants to kiss the trail of hair on his lower abdomen and follow it down lower, lower, to where she knows it leads.

“Sit down,” she breaks away and orders.

Frank gives her an amused look, but obeys and takes a seat on the couch, still breathing hard from lifting and harder still from kissing her. He leans back into the cushion, resting an arm on one of the armrests and splaying his thighs apart slightly, and for a moment Laurel doesn’t move, just stands over him. Eating him alive with her eyes. Plotting her next attack. He’s right there, ready for the taking, looking at her with that smug little grin she wants to kiss and then slap right off his face. She could peel his sweatpants off and straddle him and have him inside her in minutes if she wanted, because he’s already hard, the outline of his cock twitching through the polyester.

But her mouth is watering. She’s salivating. She wants something else, right now.

Laurel discards her blazer and peels off her blouse methodically but not hastily. If she was eating Frank alive with her eyes, he’s downright ravaging her with his, not even remotely attempting to disguise his desire, and he looks like a man who’s won the lottery when she reaches behind her back to unclasp her bra, baring her breasts to him. They’re heavier, nipples darker, so much bigger and showing no sign they’re going to stop growing anytime soon. They spill out of her hands when she cups them, aching.

He’s always been a self-proclaimed tits man. She knows exactly how much the sight of them gets him off, and for a moment she just stands there, idly toying with a sensitive, hardened nipple for his benefit and almost trembling from the resulting pain and pleasure.

 _Got some kind of fetish?_ she’d asked him, and yeah, she’s fairly sure he does.

She doesn’t mind. She’s all for mutually beneficial arrangements.

Her lips curl up into a deadly smirk. “Good thing I’m not virtuous, hm?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes, moving his arms up to spread them across the back of the couch. “You’re gonna kill me.”

“No,” Laurel corrects him, as she unbuttons her pants and sends them pooling around her ankles. “You’re not any use to me dead.”

Under any other circumstances, with anyone else, she would feel horribly self-conscious nude, but seeing the way Frank wants her like this just drives her on, liberating her from conventional scruples. Lining up her inhibitions like an executioner and shooting them down one by one. She feels free with him, in a world where she otherwise feels always on display, always watched, fawned over, touched without her permission – when _he’s_ the only one she really wants touching her.

She’s never going to be conventional. She’s sure as shit never going to be virtuous. And when Laurel drops to her knees, yanks down the elastic waistband of his sweatpants, and grabs his cock as it springs free like she’s clamoring to get her hands on her last meal, she could not care less about being either of those things.

She wants to clamber into his lap, satisfy that desire to run her tongue all over his body, but that isn’t possible anymore – not gracefully, at least – and so she settles on laving her tongue over his cock instead, mouthing his tip but not parting her lips to take him inside just yet. Her hands roam; across his lower abdomen and then to his balls, which she cups, giving a playful squeeze. She explores him eagerly, tightening her fist around the base of his cock and tracing the veins, higher and higher on his shaft until it tapers off into his tip. She alternates between her mouth and hands, until he’s slick with precome and excruciatingly hard, breathing fast for a third reason now.

“Christ-” He cuts himself off, gulping. “You’re too damn good at this.”

She doesn’t think he means to imply what that implies. He’s too much of a gentleman to ever call her a whore, even though a dark, depraved part of her brain wants him to, wants to be debased and demeaned and called all sorts of horrible things. Maybe she’ll coax it out of him, one day, but she’ll settle for the sinful little chill that lances its way through her right then.

“I have cravings, remember?” she almost sing-songs, making a show of licking her lips. “Guess today it’s you.”

His head tips all the way back onto the cushion when she parts her lips and goes in for the kill, taking as much of him into her mouth as she can and hollowing out her cheeks to suck vigorously. When she moves back, letting him slide out with a _pop_ , his cock bobs heavy and aching, and Laurel grips the base of it with her hand while swirling her tongue around the rest, varying pressures and switching between her hand and her mouth. Her eyes flit up to look at him from time to time, because she knows he loves it – and because _she_ loves watching him, seeing him so undone. He was powerful with those weights in his hands, strong enough to break her in half, but he’s never more powerless than he is when she sucks him off, reduced to moaning and begging.

He always watches her with out-of-place tenderness in his eyes when she blows him; this time is no different. She doesn’t want that. Can’t want that. This is fucking, the business of pleasure. Feelings are not at play here, even if she catches his eye from time to time and feels somehow like _she’s_ the one being worshipped, even there on her knees. He stares like a heathen at a goddess, like a man finding his religion.

She lost hers ages ago. Safe to say she’s not getting it back now.

Laurel reaches down to finger her clit to drown out those intruding thoughts with pleasure, hand working between her legs and sliding over her slippery cunt, and Frank must notice because he swears under his breath, his hips starting to lift, seeking the heat of her mouth. He’s close, and she knows she could finish him like this if she wanted, and he would enjoy it; they both would.

But again, today, she wants something else.

Laurel pulls away suddenly, and he gives an agonized groan, rendered mostly speechless, as inarticulate as a caveman communicating only with grunts. He seems to be expecting her to settle into his lap and ride him, but instead she just raises herself slightly on her knees so that her breasts are hovering beside his cock, full and heavy and pressed together when she tightens her arms at her sides, curling her shoulders inward. She yanks him down by the hips somewhat to line him up and guides his cock between her breasts, onto her cleavage. Then she lifts herself, moving up, tits bouncing so that he slides in the space between them, fucking her there instead.

“Here,” is all she says, some breathless, vague sort of direction, and she doesn’t know why she says it; he knows full well what she’s doing.

If he was speechless before, she’s pretty sure he’s never going to be able to speak again after this. It might do him in for good.

It’s not only for his benefit, either; that’s the best part. She could almost come herself just from watching her body move over him, tits bouncing enthusiastically, his cock nestled snug between them, the obscene silhouette they must make. She can feel him, too, and God, it’s amazing, her breasts so hypersensitive even the slightest brush of fabric gets her wet, these days. They rub on his shaft as she works, and they both cry out from the friction, and the knowledge that this gets both of them off equally as much makes Laurel positively seep onto the rug beneath her. They’re probably going to stain that, and the couch, if they haven’t already. She hopes they do, Bonnie’s wrath be damned.

She wants him. Wants him all over. She wants to be filthy and debased through and through, wants to drip with him, and so she quickens her pace, breathing hard from the forceful vertical motions.

“On me,” she bites out, hair falling in her face, flushed and burning. This is her own sort of workout, she muses. Core strength. “Do it.”

He grits his teeth. He’s close; she can practically see him swelling, about to burst. “Laurel… fuck-”

“I want it,” she gasps. She does. She feels insane. Her vision is one blurred mess of pale skin on skin, the room filled with a lewd refrain of flesh slapping flesh. She rubs her thighs together, whining at the sensation. “Oh, God, I want it-”

He always does give her what she wants.

He comes in surprising silence, though she figures she’s stolen his words away, made him mute altogether. His come lands in hot, thick ropes between her breasts, a few splashes higher on her collarbone, one or two on her chin. He fucking showers her, and all she can do is moan and take it, so close to coming herself but not able to quite get there on her own. She’s on her knees, covered in him to the highest degree of indecency, and to anyone on the outside she might look used, but she’s never felt more satisfied, more powerful. A drop of him lands on her lips and she licks it away while staring him straight in the eyes, and she swears it makes him come twice as hard, come until he’s given her all he has and he’s bone-dry.

He falls back onto the couch, boneless, brainless, breathing like he’s run ten miles. His eyes are bleary and unfocused. She’s never seen him this way, damn near comatose. He better _not_ be comatose.

She’s not through with him yet.

Laurel wipes herself clean with a rag he’d left sitting nearby, and it smells like musk and sweat from his workout, and it feels just right to cover herself in. She doesn’t get all of it, purposefully leaving a few creamy blotches between her breasts, a smear on her nipple, which she knows he’ll be eager to clean off himself. It’s the little things in life, after all.

“Shit,” he finally manages to wrangle a coherent word out of his vocal words. “Jesus… fuck. _Fuck_.”

She grins, feeling a twisted sort of pride. “Never used to be able to do that.”

Her breasts were always too small. Now – well, nothing about her is.

The perks of getting knocked up. There aren’t many, but she has every intention of taking advantage of the few that exist while she can, even if her life outside of sex is pretty much invariably fucked.

“That was so damn hot,” Frank sputters. He wipes the sweat off his upper lip and reaches for her when she stands. “You’re so-”

She’s maneuvering him sideways and arranging him how she wants before he can say another word, climbing atop him. He wants to kiss her, she can tell, so she lets him kiss her other, more wanting set of lips, bracing herself against the armrest and grinding her pussy into his mouth until she comes, convulsing atop him after only seconds. She’s not entirely sure he can breathe but she’s pretty sure he’ll survive, and when she finally lets him come up for air, his beard is soaked with her juices and he’s panting hard, grinning that pussy-eating grin that signals to her he’s more than all right.

After a moment, Frank laughs shakily, still fighting to catch his breath. “You’re right. You work me out way better than those damn weights.”

“Shut up about the stupid weights,” she mutters and leans down to kiss him. When she draws back, he shifts upward to seal his lips around her nipple, licking it clean and flooding her with heat. “Or do I need to sit on your face again and do it for you?”

“Not like you’re gonna catch me complai-”

She does end up having to do it for him, as it turns out, because Frank never has been good at shutting up on his own. But as he murmurs her to orgasm and she comes hard enough to see stars, Laurel knows neither of them is complaining in the end after all.


	6. Chapter 6

“Are you ignoring me just to be a jackass or is this some kind of foreplay for you?”

Laurel is at his door. Well – at Bonnie’s door, who thank God isn’t home at the moment. Laurel is very obviously irate.

Laurel asks him the question without preamble, hands on her hips, and he knew this was coming, but for some reason he still isn’t sure what to say. Because she’s right; he _has_ been ignoring her, although not answering her eight consecutive texts and four calls might be considered justified by any rational person. He’s gotten to thinking – which never ends well – and the more he thinks about their current arrangement, the more it strikes him as…

Edging on obsession. And not even _edging on_. Full-blown obsession. Addiction. They’re going to greater and greater risks to be together. The word _unsustainable_ comes to mind.

He sighs, and Laurel lets herself in without waiting to be invited. “We need to talk.”

“I’m not here to _talk_.”

He knows that; there’s only one four-letter word she’s interested in tonight. Still, Frank closes the door behind her without a word, and she comes to a stop beside Bonnie’s couch, arms folded and jaw tight with tension. Everything about her screams tension, muscles wound tight enough to snap beneath her skin. They stand there for a moment, locked in something of a battle of wills to see who will cave and make the first move, and when he stands his ground, Laurel exhales sharply, finally charging toward him and seizing his lips without an ounce of tenderness. She’s petulant when thwarted, like a spoiled child, and he pulls away quickly.

“Hey. This is getting’ out of hand, okay?” Confusion flickers in her eyes, and she opens her mouth, but he keeps going, firm. “We’re fuckin’ so much I don’t – this can’t be healthy-”

Confusion morphs into amused disbelief. “You’re _complaining_ about getting laid?”

“No, I just-” He breathes out, frustrated with his inability to articulate himself. “We need to put you in a damn chastity belt or something, you’re outta control-”

She moves in again. “Do it. Sounds kinky.”

“You aren’t hearin’ me. It’s like… a compulsion, or somethin’. Feels like I’m enabling you.”

He must be an idiot, turning down sex from the woman he loves, who is ready and willing and very insistent. Any sane man would take her into the bedroom and fuck her through the mattress without wasting another second, but the fact of the matter is that he _isn’t_ sane, and he’s worried about her, off her meds with her hormones gone wild and blowing up his phone with booty calls. Being expected to cater to her every whim without complaint isn’t sitting well with him anymore, either, not that it ever really did.

“Enable me,” she urges, backing him up against the wall. It’s half past eight, the windows behind them black with the night, and Bonnie is working late but he doesn’t have any guarantees it’ll be late enough. “Enable me hard.”

This clearly isn’t getting through to her. Frank sighs, switching up tactics.

All at once he’s reversing their positions, moving out from up against the wall and pressing her to it instead, not roughly but assertively enough that she’s stunned into submission. Her eyes go wide, almost like she’s been snapped out of her heat, and he keeps his hands circled around her forearms, pinning her there. He isn’t careless; he’s always very careful with her, but he has the feeling a passive approach isn’t going to work tonight, if he’s going to get her to take him seriously.

He lets a smirk ease its way onto his lips at how completely flabbergasted she looks. “Hey. I’m sayin’ I’m closed for business, tonight.”

That finally seems to click with her. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he drops his voice down to a purr, moving in close and feeling her forearms break out into gooseflesh. “I’m cuttin’ you off.”

At least a dozen emotions are warring in her eyes, flicking from one to the next until Laurel finally settles on, predictably enough, anger. “You’re _what_?”

“You couldn’t go one damn day without sex, you’d-”

Laurel scoffs. “I can _go_ a day without sex. I don’t have a problem.”

“All right. Then prove it.” He pauses, releasing her arms and standing up straight, but staying close enough for her to feel the press of his body. He can practically hear the blood pumping furiously in her ears, see a vein bulging in her forehead. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her so angry. “You go a whole twenty-four hours without sex, I’ll know you’re not a legitimate nympho. We can continue business as usual.”

“You think I need you that bad?” She bites out a derisive laugh. “Because I don’t.”

“That ain’t what your body is telling me.”

They both know he’s right. She’s as red as a cherry, burning with equal parts rage and arousal, the latter probably intensified by the former. He does feel a little cruel, denying her like this when she’s been waiting all day for him. Giving her blue balls. She didn’t respond well to this the first time, and that was the non-hypersexual version of Laurel. But this is not a power play like that was; a checkmate.

Or maybe it is. Just a little bit.

Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it, after all, and he never learns.

“Oh, and…” He pretends to pause for thought, eyes glittering with mirth. “No toys. No getting off with that vibrator. No getting yourself off at all, ‘cause when I see you, I’ll know if you did. Don’t make me make it two days.” He cocks his head to one side. “You might just lose your dick privileges.”

Laurel seems entirely unprepared to respond to that, and she just scoffs again, pasting on a façade of nonchalance as thin as tissue paper. “I. Don’t. Need. You.”

If he’s lived his life by an eleventh commandment, it’s always been _Thou Shalt Not Fuck with Pregnant Women_ , and now he’s just done precisely that, and judging by the look in her eyes, pupils as sharp as obsidian, she’s going to give it back to him in spades.

“You know what they say,” Frank teases, as she wrenches herself free. “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.”

The withering death-glare Laurel sends his way as she heads for the door kind of makes him doubt that’ll be the case here, though.

 

~

 

Like clockwork, almost exactly twenty-four hours later, she’s at his door again.

“I should thank you,” Laurel says, striding inside again without invitation, head held high. She’s in a mid-length pencil skirt with a red chiffon blouse tucked into it and a blazer, all prim and proper and pregnant in heels. It sets his blood at a boil immediately.

Frank closes the door, narrowing his eyes. “For what?”

“Your dick embargo didn’t work. If anything, it reminded me that I don’t need sex after all.” She takes a seat on the back of Bonnie’s couch and sets down her purse, crossing her legs defiantly, as if to signal that she’s disallowing him access. “So. I should thank you. Maybe-” She shrugs, “we should just stop.”

“Stop,” he echoes, incredulous.

Frank gives her a quick once-over, cocking an eyebrow. She’s got a certain haughtiness about her he can see right through like Plexiglas, but it’s clear she’s invested in this charade and she’s not going to give it up now, not going to admit she needs him. She’s trying to assert the very opposite, as a matter of fact, turning her nose up at him, even with rosy cheeks and suspiciously tightly-crossed legs. She’s squeezing them together hard enough to cut off her circulation, as if she’s trying to dam up the flow of something there.

He lets his mind wander as to what, exactly, that might be as he steps closer, until he’s looming over her in the space between the couch and the stairwell. She rests both hands on the back of the couch when he comes to a stop, leaning back as casually as she can manage and staring up at him without blinking, body language silently daring him to tear her cool demeanor to pieces. Tear _her_ to pieces.

But two can play at this game.

His fingers come to rest on her knee, just barely brushing it. She’s in a pair of sheer nude thigh-highs, he realizes, and at that same moment he also realizes she knew exactly what she was doing, coming here tonight. Not that he should have expected any less.

“You don’t wanna stop,” he says, as if it’s merely a disinterested observation.

Laurel doesn’t break his gaze for a moment. She grabs onto it and holds fast, unwavering. “You don’t know what I want.”

The audible hitch in her breathing when he starts to sink down onto his knees tells a different story, however.

“You can lie to yourself all you want, Laurel,” Frank tells her, the words loaded with meaning, implications that extend far beyond their current predicament. He moves forward, pressing a kiss just below her kneecap, and reaches out to uncross her legs. “But you can’t lie to me.”

For a moment, with all the glaring she’s doing down at him, he’s sure she’s going to kick him away. He’s on his knees, humbling himself to her, and he knows she’s likely to flee when he reads her like this, when she feels she’s unwittingly stepped into his crosshairs. But instead Laurel just swallows, staring down at him with her jaw set, allowing him to part her thighs and run his hands up and down the length of them. Her stockings are the stay-up kind, thick elastic bands encircling her thighs, which he strokes idly for a while just to listen to her breathing quicken. They’re barely-there, begging to be ripped off, but he opts for a more methodical approach by first slipping off her heels and then reaching back up to peel them down slowly, his eyes never leaving hers.

She’s a feast of exposed skin when he’s finished, dropping them onto the carpet next to her shoes. Laurel looks, again, furious and furiously aroused, caught between the two and unable to decide which she should be. She hates admitting her own weakness, crawling back to him or anyone. He wants to drop his pants and fuck into her right here, bend her over the back of this couch, but as much as he wants that, he wants her to admit it, first.

Wants her to beg.

When Laurel finally speaks, her voice is a croak. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

Laurel makes a soft, indignant little whine, leaning her head back. “Don’t _fucking_ stop there.”

“Y’know, for someone who needs something from me…” He drifts off, grinning devilishly. “You’re not askin’ very nicely.” He lays a kiss higher, just above her kneecap this time, hands running up and down the length of her thighs and slowly edging up her skirt. He thinks he can smell her, damp between her thighs, the heady scent of cotton and musk; a day’s worth of waiting. “Not gonna fuck you unless you beg.”

She grits her teeth. “Frank-”

Her name has barely even left his mouth when he tugs her up onto her feet and into a punishing kiss. She doesn’t seem to have any complaints, responding eagerly and standing up on her toes, hands roaming his body. He shucks her blazer so roughly she squeaks against his mouth, and walks her backwards, pressing her up against the side of stairs and spindles of the railing. He intertwines his hands with hers and draws them up to those spindles, grasping them there until her fingers slowly get the message and wrap around them too.

They break apart for a moment, both panting, and Laurel licks her lips, taunting him even though he can feel her trembling with need. “Thought you said you weren’t gonna fuck me unless I begged.”

“I’m not gonna fuck you,” he rasps, and in one swift movement grabs ahold of her blouse and parts it down the middle. The buttons pop. He thinks he hears one fly straight off, and Laurel gasps into his mouth. “But I am gonna make you come.”

The shiver that runs through her is a full-bodied one. She’s grazing her teeth across her lower lip, hands still hooked around the spindles behind her almost as if she’s restrained, helpless. But she’s restraining herself more than anything, allowing him to take control, because all this – denial and begging and roughness – it gets her off, and that’s one more thing she won’t admit. Her nostrils are flared, breath coming in shallow pants. Dark eyes like smoldering coals, inviting him to do his worst. He _will_.

His hands are at her bra, next – at least two or three cup sizes bigger than it used to be – and thank whichever god it is that is in charge of doling out small sexual blessings, it’s the type that unclasps in the front. He rips that off with the same force, leaving her breasts bare before him, and for a moment lets himself stare with unrestrained hunger. He has a twisted fascination with them; he can’t lie. He’s caught glimpses of them plenty of times since they started, but he never had the luxury of staring for long, because she was almost always pinning him down and riding him or shoving his face between her thighs. Now, though, he’s got her pinned down like a thumbtack, and fuck, all he can _do_ is stare.

They’re swollen, the nipples dark and hardened into stiff, wanting peaks, areola wide as sand dollars. He reaches out to cup them and they’re so much heavier than they were before, perfect pillowlike weights in his palms. Laurel hisses the instant he touches them, and that’s all the confirmation he needs that they’re oversensitive, full and sore.

“Oh, God-” Laurel whimpers and starts to release the spindles, but he brings his hands back up and holds them there, clicking his tongue as a reprimand.

“Uh uh uh,” he scolds. “You keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

She has to bite her tongue to keep from retorting, but in the end Laurel doesn’t say anything, just gulps and anchors herself against the railing. She puffs her chest out, in something of a silent offering, and when she does he can’t help but grin. But he doesn’t move in all at once, attack her, because he knows how tender they are, and so instead he leans down, closing his mouth lightly around her right nipple while using his fingers to toy with the other. He’s always been a tits man and he’s not ashamed of the fact, and Laurel’s tits like this are goddamn heaven, like he could lose himself in them. If he could he’d suck her dry, drain her until she had nothing left to give.

He feels rabid at the sight of her there, blouse hanging open, breasts bare, the top of her belly poking out over her skirt. Her complexion is all peaches and cream, pale white skin and scarlet cheeks and a flush that creeps across her body, snaking lower and lower, and he pictures her covered with other sorts of cream as well, dripping with him. She’s whimpering, like an injured animal. Like he’s the Big Bad Wolf and he skipped straight to pinning her down and feasting on her instead of playing the long con.

“Fuck, Laurel,” he breathes against her cleavage, and that’s all he seems to be able to do in the way of speaking for a while.

He pinches one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger, and it takes him aback when she nearly howls at the feeling. It’s equal proportions pain and pleasure, he can tell, and Laurel writhes against the wall so hard he positions his knee between her legs to hold her still.

“They hurt?” Frank growls into the hollow of her throat. “Tell me how they feel.”

“Oh, fuck, they’re so… full. Feels like they’re burning. I feel them all the time.” She lets loose a strangled laugh, which segues into a moan when he gives that same nipple another experimental flick. “They hurt but it’s so… _fucking good_.”

He rolls them between his thumbs and forefingers until she’s as limp as a ragdoll, so driven on by so little contact, her tits as wanting as her cunt, and when he does he knows what he’s suspected all along: that he could get her to come doing nothing more than this, sucking and stroking and torturing her breasts. She’s grinding down openly onto his knee where it rests between her legs, canting her hips, desperate for some kind of friction, but the moment he seals his mouth around her breast and gives a long, hard pull, her hips cease all movement. Her knuckles go ghost-white from grasping the spindles.

It’s driving her insane. She’s moaning like she moans when he fucks her. She _loves_ it, crying out wantonly in the middle of Bonnie’s living room where Bonnie could step inside and find them at any moment, and he thinks the peril of this and the thought of them being discovered only drives her on more. She’s still as much the porch-sex exhibitionist she was when he first met her.

Maybe the porch could use revisiting, later.

“You like that?” he presses, and Laurel almost sobs.

“God, yes – Jesus, Frank, _more_. More…”

He considers pausing to make her beg like he’d said, but somehow that seems unappealing when he already has her in the palm of his hand, grinding on his knee and moaning. Instead he twists and pinches and sucks and blows cool air at her nipples until her cries have faded, until she’s mostly gone hoarse and hiccupping and all she can seem to do is twitch against him, in what looks to be a state of sensory overload. He can tell he’s gotten her close to the edge, and he draws back to look at her, breasts gleaming with his saliva, nipples dark red from the abuse and overstimulation. She’s barely conscious and not at all coherent, and God, he thinks, she’s so beautiful. So far gone. So _his_.

His. He paws her breasts and stomach possessively, tracing the firm swell and feeling her shake. He’s ravenous, transfixed by it, and he remembers that night, and he wants so badly to ask.

He doesn’t. He can’t. They’ve established this arrangement on two fundamental ground rules: don’t talk about the baby and don’t talk about love, and so for once in his goddamn life, he keeps his mouth shut.

He distracts himself from those thoughts by laving his tongue over the hard little bud of her nipple and latching on to it again instead, cherishing every thin, needy sound he wrings from her throat. Finally, in an act of mercy, he peels up her skirt and slides his knee between her legs, this time directly over her panties, granting her more direct stimulation, though not by much. They’re sopping wet, obscenely so, and Laurel jerks against him, squirming, uttering profanities, a litany of indecipherable words, but still not begging outright, stubborn even in the throes of pleasure.

“I’m gonna-” She almost growls, teeth gritted. “Oh… God-”

Frank smirks and gives his knee a shove up, just a bit higher, wedging it more firmly between her thighs. “What’s the magic word?”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” is what he gets instead, spat like venom.

He chuckles. “That’s not it.”

“You get off on this, don’t you?” Laurel’s upper lip curls into a snarl. “You like me helpless. You like that I need you. _Fuck_ you.”

“You just admit you need me?”

“Oh, God.” Laurel gulps, and when she goes silent, he shifts his knee, making her moan. “ _Yes_ I fucking need you, Frank, I need you to make me come, you _know_ I need it, just-”

_He_ doesn’t need to be told twice. He moves with laser-precision, closing his lips around a swollen nipple one last time and biting gently while rocking his knee between her legs, grinding it against her. It’s a coordinated strike, all the right amounts of pressure she needs in all the right places, and he has her coming apart in seconds without so much as slipping his fingers inside her, coming with a dizzying intensity that burrows down into her bones and rocks through her from the inside out.

“Shit,” he breathes the word out on a chuckle, sliding his hands down to cup the undersides of her breasts. Her eyelids flutter closed when she comes, and he watches, before leaning in and sucking a mark onto her neck. “That all it takes for you now?”

Laurel manages a laugh. “Makes your job easier.”

It takes a minute or so for Laurel to compose herself, and when she does he leans in, kissing her too roughly to feel out of place but too tenderly to feel totally appropriate, here. She smells like sweat cut with stale vanilla perfume she must have put on this morning and something indescribably deeper; musk, desire, pheromones, the drenched lace of her panties. It drives him mad.

“Can’t keep fucking in places like this. You’re gettin’ bigger, we need a bed.”

She cringes, finally releasing the spindles and standing up straight. “Don’t remind me.”

“Just means you’re gettin’ hotter too,” he replies, smooth as a serpent. “Soon I’m not gonna let you leave the damn bed at all. And speaking of beds-” He nods up at the stairs behind them. “I know one nobody’s usin’.”

She looks skeptical, law student through and through. There’s always a caveat; a catch. She’s always been smart enough to know that.

“What happened to making me beg?”

“We got time for that,” he quips and takes a step toward the stairs, gesturing for her to follow, smirking when she does. Like a moth to a flame – although he no longer knows who is the moth, here, and who is the flame. “Night is still young, ain’t it?”


	7. Chapter 7

She’s smacked in the nose by an olfactory assault of garlic and tomato the second he opens the door.

“You’re making me dinner.”

It isn’t a question, because without question that _is_ exactly what Frank is doing: standing there in Bonnie’s kitchen in an apron with a rag slung over his shoulder, making her dinner. It’s more of an incredulous observation, because when she initiated this booty call she was expecting nothing more than that. Not booty and breakfast.

Not… booty and spaghetti and meatballs, which is what this seems to be.

“Bon went out for drinks with a co-worker or somethin’, won’t be home ‘til late. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a good meal in you,” he tells her, as he turns back to a saucepot on the stove. “Spaghetti and meatballs with my special sauce.”

Laurel kicks off her flats and sets them aside, scowling despite her best efforts not to look aggravated. Because she won’t deny this is a nice gesture, but she’s cranky after a long, shitty week, ankles swollen and back aching, and she really just needs to get dragged upstairs and drilled six ways to Sunday to take the edge off all this stress. She’s not interested in _eating_.

It also feels dangerously close to something a boyfriend or baby daddy might do – neither of which he is.

Or, well. Neither of which she’s going to let him call himself, that’s for damn sure.

“We couldn’t just order a pizza?” she asks as she makes her way over to where he stands at the stove, placing her hands on his sides and pressing herself against him as seductively as she can manage with her lump of a stomach always preceding her. “There’s only one kind of special sauce I want and… it’s not this one.”

He scoffs as her hands creep lower, hooking in his belt loops. “You’re a little freak, you know that?”

“I know you are.” Her hands go to his back, next, and begin to pull at the knot on his apron. “But what am I?”

For a moment, she’s sure she’s persuaded him, but then, apparently unmoved by her advances, Frank nudges her off and takes a step back to peek at something baking in the oven, a puff of heat flowing out as he opens the door. It looks like garlic bread, from the little glimpse she catches, and Laurel scoffs.

This is a first; she’s never had any guy choose _garlic bread_ over sex with her. Although it smells incredible enough that she can almost, almost give him a pass.

“I’ll take care of your sexual appetite, trust me. But right now lemme take care of your actual one.”

Laurel huffs, folding her arms and tucking herself into the corner of the counter beside him. “I’m not hungry, Frank, just-”

As if on cue, a loud, protesting gurgle issues from her stomach. Frank raises an eyebrow.

“You need to be eatin’ good, okay? Just sit down and lemme feed you.” There’s a mischievous glint in his eye. “We’ll burn off the calories later.”

It’s clear there’s no changing his mind, and so, as defiant as a child, Laurel pushes herself up and plops down onto the counter, beside his cutting board and colorful array of minced garlic and herbs and vegetables. She can’t exactly do it gracefully, but if there’s one thing she hates it’s being dismissed, made to wait, and she’s certainly not about to let her presence be ignored.

Frank stares at her, amused. “Really?”

“Keep going,” she says with a flippant little shrug as she lets her feet dangle. “Don’t mind me.”

For a while Laurel watches him in silence as he moves, chopping and dicing and mincing things and adding spices to the sauce without so much as consulting a recipe. She’s always been a hopeless cook, subsisting mainly off pre-packaged salads and granola bars and takeout, and increasingly relying on the offerings of the office vending machine as her cravings grow more peculiar. She can appreciate his skill at this. She never had anyone cook for her, Laurel realizes, excluding the hordes of help at her father’s home who did it as their job. No one she dated. No one ever did it for _her_ , because they wanted to.

No one except him.

It all feels a bit too domestic, being here like this with Frank, and every warning siren and shrill, piercing alarm is sounding in her head, screeching at her to run, but she stays planted right where she is against her better judgement. For the first time in ages, she just allows herself to _be_ with him, in this comfortable, lived-in silence, without the expectation of more. If she closes her eyes she can almost imagine they’ve gone back in time, before his sudden flight from the city, when they were together and everything was simple.

It was never simple, she corrects herself. But simple compared to whatever they have now.

God. _Whatever they have now_. The hormones are making her sentimental tonight. She’d almost prefer they just make her constantly horny, because at least that way she doesn’t have to _think_.

Frank removes the garlic bread after the timer blares, ripping the track right out from under that train of thought. He sets it on a serving plate beside her, and it makes her stomach give another anguished groan – and so, as stealthily as she can manage, she swipes a halved cherry tomato from his cutting board and pops it into her mouth. As soon as Frank turns back from the stove, he notices, lips quirking up into a grin.

“You eatin’ my ingredients now?”

Laurel shrugs mid-bite. “I’m eating for two. Don’t I get a pass?”

“If you’re that hungry, here,” he tells her, picking up a wooden spoon and dipping it into the sauce, then bringing it over to where she sits. He keeps a hand cupped under it to stop any spillage, wriggling his eyebrows. “Try it.”

Laurel licks her lips, feigning disinterest. “You’ve already pulled this move on me, you know that right?”

“I do,” he admits. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t work every time.”

Laurel rolls her eyes, but sits up anyway, leaning in and closing her lips around the end of the spoon to taste. It’s rich, seasoned to perfection with earthy undertones of basil and oregano, and she gives a satisfied little hum, eyes locked on his as she swirls her tongue around the spoon for effect, knowing from the look in his eyes that he’s envisioning her lips around something else entirely. A small bit goes dribbling down one side of her mouth, red as blood, and she catches it with her fingertip, popping it into her mouth and sucking the digit clean. Her gaze is all wide-eyed innocence, as if she has no idea at all the effect she has on him. Laurel sees his eyes darken as he watches her – and right then, she knows she has him.

He’s feeding her, but _he’s_ the one eating out of the palm of her hand. Just the way she likes it.

Just the way he always is, really.

“Good?”

She shrugs, as though unimpressed. “Needs salt.”

Frank chuckles and withdraws, making his way over to the refrigerator next. “Yeah, yeah. Got you some of these for dessert, too.”

He returns with a small box, branded with the name of a bakery she doesn’t recognize, and when he opens it she finds herself staring at half a dozen cannoli, little pastry shells dusted with powdered sugar and overflowing with cream-colored filling, which itself is dotted with mini-chocolate chips. She almost has to laugh at how much of a stereotypical Italian he is, seducing her with cannoli, but instead she just finds herself sighing longingly.

“Oh, God.” Laurel stops herself from reaching out and shoving three down her throat at once; she’s been craving sugar all week, and she’s always had a sweet tooth. “You trying to make me fatter than I already am?”

“I like a girl who can eat.”

“What a groundbreaking come-on,” she quips, feeling herself flush from the heat of the stove and his stare. “Never heard that one before.”

Frank plucks one out of the box, unperturbed, and holds it out to her – but not for her to grab hold of. He extends it up to her mouth instead, and he gives a little nod to make his intentions clear. Laurel almost wants to laugh, but the gravity of his gaze gives her pause; this doesn’t seem to be a joke at all for him, and normally she’d balk at the idea of being fed like a child, like some invalid, but something about this, the way he’s looking at her-

She could have fun with this.

“Really?” Laurel tries to scoff, but her voice comes out too tight and saturated with desire to be mocking.

Something switches on in his eyes, dark and lusty and dangerous. There’s a shift in the air, too, a sudden drop in pressure like one that would accompany a storm, and they both feel it.

“Said you were eatin’ for two. Eat up.”

Laurel doesn’t respond. Instead she just leans forward, chin raised boldly, and sinks her teeth into the pastry. She does it slowly, though, slowly enough and with a bit of showmanship to get the effect of wrapping her lips around it first, because there’s too much sexual imagery in this one damn dessert for her not to use it to her advantage, from the vaguely phallic shape to the creamy filling. It’s sweet, the shell flaking and dissolving in her mouth when she takes a bite, and she brushes the crumbs aside with her finger as she chews, again sliding the tip of one into her mouth.

Another bite or two and she’s polished it off, and she glances up to find Frank watching her, still with that deep, dark hunger. He sets aside the box and moves closer, resting his hands on her thighs, looking up at her on her countertop perch like he suddenly has zero interest in eating anything other than her.

“Good?” he asks, with a knowing smirk and an equally knowing look in his eyes.

Laurel hums. “You’re gonna spoil my dinner.”

“Just gonna wet your appetite,” he undertones, and drops to his knees. “Among other things.”

He eats her out the same way he cooks; all innate, easy confidence, no stopping to consult her, ask if he’s doing what she wants, because he _knows_ he’s doing what she wants. The knowledge that he knows her body so well is as infuriating as it is arousing, and she doesn’t dare look down at him because she doesn’t think she can stand to see the tenderness in his eyes she knows must be there, that same tenderness he infuses into his every lick and suck, the adoration inherent in his touch. He’s never quite managed to let go of it since they started, even if he was supposed to leave his heart at home.

Frank works leisurely, all teasing and no zeal, no actual effort to get her off; she can tell he wants to warm her up, set her at a low simmer and keep her there until he can get her to the bedroom. So he traces her lips with his tongue, applying gentle pressure to her clit, barely sliding the tips of his fingers inside her, and he’s simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, too much and God, not even _close_ to enough. The pleasure is like a low voltage current coursing through her veins, steady yet distinctly unsatisfying.

By the time he’s done tormenting her, she’s hooked her leg over his shoulder and is grasping the knob on one of the cabinets behind her desperately, trying not to go tumbling off the counter. Her dress is bunched up around her hips, bare stomach poking out. Panties dangling around her ankle and bare ass on the granite countertop, all on display. This is absolutely not sanitary, but Frank looks loose-limbed and as self-satisfied as ever when he rises to his feet, and she doesn’t think he gives much of a shit.

He’s eaten his fill and left her starving. And she’s not about to let him get away with that.

Before she can collect her wits and come up with something to fire at him, however, Frank is holding out his fingers, slick and shiny with her wetness. He has that same beckoning look in his eye as he did before, tempting as the serpent in the garden of Eden – and all at once, it occurs to her what this is. One final offering.

One last taste.

She’s still gasping for air, but she licks his fingers clean as if savoring the sweetest delicacy she’s ever had in her life, moaning around them and letting her eyes fall closed. She can feel the barely-contained want rumbling under Frank’s skin, like the epicenter of an earthquake about to unleash itself, but somehow he holds back until she’s cleaned off every drop with a look of pseudo-obedience that she knows must have him as starved as she is.

“Taste like my sauce?” he jokes, and Laurel resists the urge to kick him.

She yanks him against her by the front of his stupid apron and kisses him instead. “I fucking hate you.”

“But you love fucking me.”

That’s… That is-

God dammit. She can’t even argue with that.

She also can’t argue when he tugs her down off the counter at last and pecks her hard on the lips, before spinning her around so she faces away from him. Laurel braces herself against the counter and simultaneously braces herself for impact, trying not to shiver when he peels up her dress once more. Getting fucked from behind is decidedly unromantic, just the way she likes it, but his hands linger softly on her hips for just one second too long and she can feel the longing in his touch, and she really, really wishes she couldn’t.

“About time,” she jeers, and that earns her a swift smack on the ass. It’s forceful enough to burn, and the heat travels straight to her cunt. “ _Ah_.”

“You know me. I like to take my time.”

She can feel him rustling behind her, undoing his apron and pulling down his zipper, and when he finally rests his cock in the cleft of her ass, her patience is wearing pretty damn thin. She’s dripping wet, bent over a counter and exposed and disheveled, and she can only imagine what she must look like to him this way, and fuck, she doesn’t even _care_ at this point, she just needs-

He slips lower, gliding across her folds and slicking himself with her arousal, and when he does, the thought dissolves mid-way through. She’s dizzy with want, all her senses except touch simply ceasing to work altogether, and with them gone every sensation feels intensified a hundred times over. Her cunt flutters when he touches it, slipping just barely between her lips and then stopping, so close if she could angle her hips just right and move back she might be able to get him inside her, get _something_ more. It would be so easy.

But because this is Frank she’s entrusted with her orgasms for some goddam reason, it’s anything but.

“What do you want?” His voice is buttery smooth, decadent like velvet dragging across her skin. He’s ordering her, but not roughly; he almost coos the words to her, coaxing her like a child. “Say it.”

She grits her teeth. “Frank-”

“You called me,” he reminds her. This time there’s an edge to the words, a dull blade. “You want somethin’ from me, you tell me what it is. You tell me how you want it.”

Laurel caves, in the interest of expediting matters, and bites out, “Fuck me.”

He hums, considering that response and apparently finding it insufficient.

“Gonna have to gimme more than that, princess.”

Princess. The nickname makes her tremble in her core, and she’s sure they both feel the fresh surge of wetness on his cock, the way that pet name breaks open something inside her and makes her leak like a sieve all over him. She’s not a princess, not anymore. She doesn’t think there’s any fairytale that would have her at this point, but this right here with Frank is more than fairytale enough, dark and bloody and raw; some fucked-up Brothers Grimm version. She’s Alice in Wonderland fallen down this rabbit hole and ravished, and she’s sure as shit never going back.

“I don’t wanna be able to _walk_ tomorrow, I want to be… begging you to stop, is that fucking specific enough for-”

He’s inside her before she can finish that sentence – because yes. Apparently, that _is_ specific enough. Her knees go wobbly when he finally has mercy on her, reaching down and around to circle her wanting clit. Frank moves fast, every snap of his hips rough but finessed, and soon enough he falls into a rhythm that has her head falling forward, fingers gripping the countertop but sliding off again and again, a steady stream of cries issuing from her mouth. She’s limp and boneless. She’s held up only by him and her increasingly tenuous grip on the counter, propped up between them, body crunching like a drawbridge. Trapped.

Not trapped. She’s exactly where she wants to be.

He’s almost drubbing her, fucking her raw. Mounting her from behind like a dog, and she grinds back against him eagerly, pitching her ass in the air, both of them drunk on adrenaline and running on pure instinct. She can feel all of him at his angle, and he’s deep inside her, almost bottoming out, and she wants him deeper still. More. Always more.

Laurel can feel his dull fingernails digging into her hipbones, and when her first orgasm bowls over her and her cunt spasms around him, he presses them in hard enough for her to squeak in pain. There’s something unfulfilling about it, though; it twists through her like a brief, hot snarl of pleasure, there and gone and leaving her craving more. As if he senses that, Frank doesn’t ease up, just picks up the pace until the sound of skin colliding with skin fills the room, punctuated now and then by grunts and moans, hymns all their own.

She stumbles a little when she comes, but Frank catches her by the hips and holds her up, and she can hear him laugh breathlessly. “Woah there.”

Laughing. How the hell can he be balls-deep inside her and _laughing_. She hates that he can reduce her to a moaning, slack-jawed mess while staying so composed himself, and she should feel humiliated, and she _does_ , a little; humiliated by how desperate she is. It only sweetens the pleasure, that delicious clench of shame like a fist in her stomach.

“Don’t stop,” is all she can say, consumed with need. Eaten alive by it. She gives a low, guttural moan that morphs into a growl. “Don’t stop, don’tstop-”

She can tell when Frank’s rhythm starts to falter that his ironclad composure is slipping, however, lost to the crescendo of pleasure. He’s calm and collected right up until the moment he isn’t, pounding into her with abandon. His pace is downright punishing and only growing more so by the second, the pressure inside her boiling over as his fingers dance across her clit. She’s not thinking. Her brain can process only sensation and nothing else. Her entire body is thrumming with it.

Her climax slices through her like a spreading crack in glass, breaking her apart more with each wave just when she’d thought it was through. It embeds itself in her cells and splits them apart, rips her open, until she’s flushed deep crimson and sweaty, drifting out of the stratosphere but somehow also as grounded to earth as she’s ever been. She’s so lost she barely even notices when Frank comes, until he’s pulling out and spinning her around, kissing her before either of them have the chance to readjust their clothes or catch their breath. He slips his tongue into her mouth, and it’s sloppy, and all she can taste is herself; on his tongue and on her own, and it’s so good. Dirty and wrong and the most right she’s ever felt.

They stay like that for a while, tangled in each other, foreheads pressed together, panting. She inhales every breath he lets out, two life forms in symbiosis, because the only time she can seem to remember to breathe anymore is when she’s with him. She’s far too lightheaded from the force of her climax to remember to scowl when he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and kisses her lightly on the tip of her nose. It’s all too loving, all too gentle. All too good.

Better than she deserves.

Finally, he murmurs, “How’re you?”

“Really?” Laurel chortles. “You just bent me over the counter and _now_ you’re gonna make small talk?”

“I’m a good ole fashioned lover-boy, what can I say?”

She laughs, free and full and from a place in her chest that hasn’t seen use in ages. She doesn’t laugh much these days, and Frank’s eyes light up when she does, like he’s accomplished some enviable feat. Like it’s the only thing he really wanted out of tonight, sex and dinner dates be damned.

She can see them in his eyes, too; those three forbidden words she won’t even so much as let herself think, those three words he knows he can’t say. It’s like staring at the sun, painful and awful and blinding and yet, for some inexplicable, masochistic goddamn reason, all Laurel wants to do is keep looking.

 _Beep_.

The timer on the stove blares next to them, right then, and startles both of them out of it.

Thank God. Saved by the bell.

Frank tears himself away to strain the water from the spaghetti, looking over his shoulder briefly at her. “Take a seat. Dinner’s on in five.”

It’s like flipping a switch; the way he goes from dicking her down one minute to domesticated the next. It leaves her head spinning and her brain can’t quite remember how to make her legs work, and so Laurel just stays where she is, leaning up against the counter.

“Thought we skipped dinner,” she jokes as she smooths her dress down. “Went straight to dessert.”

“That was only the first course,” he tells her with a smirk, and it’s lame, corny as hell, but he possess an uncanny ability to make it sound sexy anyway. “I got a few more in me tonight.”

She cocks her head to one side. “Only a _few_?”

“All right, all right.” He grins, eyes warm with fondness. “Tie a napkin around your neck and sit down and lemme feed you already, and I’ll give you as many rounds as you want.”

This is the one thing she swore she would not do, the line she told herself she would not blur; let Frank take care of her, do anything for her beyond provide the necessary orgasms. Get too close and too familiar and forget that he isn’t anything to her, make _her_ forget he isn’t anything to her. She’d drawn up an imaginary contract for this little arrangement of theirs in her head, and that clause wasn’t in the fine print; it was bolded and underlined and highlighted and typed in size-100 font on page one. It was the one rule she could not let herself break, even if it feels like it was made to be broken.

She takes a seat, ties that napkin around her neck, and digs in anyway.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have arrived at the end! PLEASE leave me some comments to let me know what you thought of this fic. It was a blast to write but never got a ton of feedback, so I'd love to hear from you.
> 
> Thanks for reading and enjoy!

~

 

I would like to be the air  
that inhabits you for a moment  
only. I would like to be that unnoticed  
& that necessary.

\- Margaret Atwood, Variation on the Word Sleep

 

~

 

And then, as he’s prone to doing, he goes and ruins it.

Seven words, one question – _Are you sure the baby’s not mine?_ – and it’s over as unceremoniously as it began. He should have known better. He _did_ know better.

The not knowing was killing him. Now it’s just killing him more, because at least before Laurel wasn’t actively shutting him out. She wasn’t letting him in, either, at least not in the ways that mattered – but she wasn’t shutting him out, and he was enough of an idiot to accept just a fraction of her. To accept being pulled out and used and played with like a toy before being stashed away on a shelf in the morning.

He’d told her he was there for her. Whatever she needed. So she took what she needed and got the hell out of Dodge at the first sign of danger, and he doesn’t know what he was honestly expecting. He was never anything more to her than a cock, a pair of hands, a mouth. A quick, reliable fuck when she needed it. If he’d thought she’d fall back in love with him, he was dead wrong; she disabused him of that notion pretty damn thoroughly.

It could be his.

He remembers that night, how he came pawing at her door like a stray dog, and for some reason he’ll never understand, she let him in – even knowing you can’t feed strays, not unless you want them to keep coming back. He remembers the tears in her eyes when she came, how she’d wiped them away as if she could keep him from seeing. He remembers the way she trembled, cupped his cheeks and stared into his eyes like if she let go he might vanish, only a dream in the end. It all feels so distant that it may as well have been a dream, and no doubt Laurel would prefer it to have been one.

_It’s not yours_.

She hadn’t even hesitated. He’s never seen someone so deep in denial, like she’s living in an alternate version of reality where she’s simply decided to erase the possibility altogether. She spoke with the infallible certainty of someone who believes their own lie, and she _has_ been lying: to everyone, Annalise and the others and Bonnie, sticking to the simpler of two outcomes, but he knows as well as anyone that a lie by omission is still a lie. She has a thousand reasons for not wanting it to be his and yet he can’t deny that it stings; to think the idea she could be carrying his child makes her miserable, that the only way she can survive is by running on self-delusion.

He doesn’t call.

It wears away at him by the day, corrosive like acid. He barely sleeps, and when he does sleep, he dreams of her, belly full and round, or of a tiny boy with his eyes, or a girl with Laurel’s smile. They’re always just out of reach in his dreams, though, vanishing into thin air before he can reach out to touch them. When he presses his hand to her swollen stomach, he receives no answering kick, no flutter; just horrible empty stillness, like the baby is retreating from him.

He’s chilled to the bone when he wakes, and he can feel the weight of his sins like an infection in his bones, rotting him from the inside out. He doesn’t call, because the last good thing he can do for her, now, is stay away.

He doesn’t call, because she’s happier living a lie than she could ever be with him. Still, he doesn’t love her selflessly enough to let her go completely, and so Frank throws himself into studying for the LSAT instead, and sometimes he can almost convince himself that he isn’t doing it for her, convince himself that even for an hour or a minute or a second he’s forgotten about her – when in reality, he never does. She’s always present in the fringes of his subconscious, like a shadow just out of view.

He doesn’t call.

And then, one night, she does.

~

 

She doesn’t answer at first when he knocks on her door.

“Laurel? Hey, it’s me.”

A storm is howling outside, droplets of water falling through the leaky roof and plopping one by one onto the ground in the hallway. They fall with the rhythm of a ticking clock, counting off Mississippi’s as he stands there and receives only silence from the other side of the door. The longer he waits, the larger the pit of dread in his stomach becomes. She’d been short and upset on the phone, nothing more than a _Can you come over?_ and hung up before he could even finish asking what was wrong.

His heart is lodged in his throat. He was never nervous before their trysts, probably because he knew roughly what to expect and what was expected of him, but he has no idea what this is, here. The longer he waits, the more convinced he is that something is in fact wrong, and he’s about to resort to picking the lock when he hears, faintly:

“It’s open.”

The ancient hinges give a collective squeal of protest as he swings the door open with more force than he needs. He finds her there on the bed, sitting facing away from him and watching water drip from another leak down into a bucket she’d placed in the middle of her floor. She’s wrapped herself in a cardigan, and it strikes him for a moment how sad and solitary of a silhouette she makes, alone in the night.

“You can’t be leavin’ this open, you want the whole neighborhood takin’ the invitation to-”

She turns. And the instant she does, he stops talking.

Her face is red, eyes bloodshot and cheeks damp with tears, sucking in every breath in a thick, stuttering way that he knows must mean she’s been crying for a while. Immediately his mouth falls shut, his entire demeanor softening, and he goes to her without thinking, without remembering to maintain a careful distance.

“Hey,” he says, softly, stopping beside the end of the bed. She’s turned away from him again, now, avoiding his eyes by whatever means necessary. “What’s wrong?”

The moment he asks the question, it’s like a wall slams down between them.

“Nothing,” she bites out. “I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have called. I just-” She sucks in a shaky breath to stabilize herself, and he circles around her front, crouching down so he can look her in the eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t have anyone else to call.”

She’s been so alone for so long, it occurs to him. She puts up a solid front of having her shit together, pretending not to need anyone, but he knows, deep down, how afraid she really is. Laurel looks small and scared right then, like a child; smaller than he thinks he’s ever seen her, and he can tell she’s furious with herself for breaking down and calling him, even more furious for letting him see her cry.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, inching closer, but inching is all he dares to do for a while, until he gets brave and reaches out to touch her hand. “I’m here, it’s-”

She withdraws like he’s burned her. “Don’t. Just – just… don’t.”

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the storm beat at her windows like it’s trying to break its way in. It’s physically killing him not to comfort her, pull her into his arms and kiss her tears away, even if he knows that’s the last thing she wants him to do. Finally, Laurel scrubs at her cheeks with the ends of her sleeves and sniffs, sitting up slightly.

“It’s all a mess. This was all…” Her voice breaks. “This was all a huge mistake.” She lowers her eyes to her stomach, that curve that seems almost ominous now. “I can’t do this. Have this baby, I-”

Her words are nonsensical, blubbering sentence fragments pieced together in ways that don’t make much sense, but he listens without interjecting, silent and steady beside her, because he knows that’s what she needs from him.

“I don’t even know who his fucking father is,” she laughs darkly, like this is all some kind of horrendous, sick joke, and maybe, he thinks, maybe it is. “I’m the last person who should be a parent.”

He knows, then, why he was the only one she could call.

“You’re gonna be a kickass mom, you know that,” he tells her, eliminating himself from the equation entirely. He tries to be chipper, but the attempt falls flat on its face, and she doesn’t even so much as smile. “Kid’s lucky already and he doesn’t even know it.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” she scoffs. “I’m gonna fuck him up. I already did.” She laughs, again. “Having to get him paternity tested before he’s even born is a pretty giant fuck-up, wouldn’t you say?”

“Laurel-”

“It can’t be yours,” she says, suddenly, cutting him off. There’s anger laced through the words; at him, at herself, and she grits her teeth, still avoiding his eyes. “If it’s yours, Frank, I-” Laurel swallows and picks at a hangnail on her thumb, so hard he seems tiny droplets of blood seep to the surface. “The way they’d look at me. Annalise and Bonnie and… everyone. All the stuff they’ve done for me because they think it’s his, I…”

Frank doesn’t know quite what she means, but he doesn’t ask. He realizes all at once that this has been killing her, too, as much as it’s been killing him, their dirty secret eating them alive in silence. It would be easier for her if the baby wasn’t his. So much easier. She might even find a way to be happy, and that’s all he wants, all he’s ever wanted: her to be happy.

“So we hope it’s his,” he proposes, simply, and he expects Laurel to scoff at the idea, but instead, all she does is give him a long, sad look.

“You want it to be yours, though.”

This time, he’s the one who has to look away. He can’t tell her she’s wrong. He can’t be selfless all the time, and he can’t extinguish that stupid, selfish hope inside him, no matter how hard he’s tried.

His lack of response is all the confirmation she needs, and they fall into silence again. This one feels suffocating, like it’s sucking all the air out of the room, depressurizing like an aircraft mid-flight. She sits there without a word, and he stays crouched before her, knowing he should say something but having absolutely no idea what that something should be.

“I love you,” is all he can think to say, knowing full well that’s the last thing Laurel wants to hear at the moment, and she closes her eyes, wincing like the words cause her pain. “I don’t care.”

“Frank, I cannot do this right now-”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he assures her, finally catching her gaze. “Just know… no matter what happens. If he’s mine or not. I’m still gonna love you. Nothin’…” He gulps, faltering. He isn’t good with words. He’s worse with them when he needs them the most. “Nothin’ could ever change the way I feel about you.”

“That’s easy for you to say now,” she mutters cynically. “But in three months when I’m stuck with a screaming baby, you still gonna feel the same?”

Frank smiles, trying to inject a bit of levity. “Guess you’re gonna have to take my word for it ‘til I can prove it to you.”

She doesn’t smile, but some of the tension does ease its way out of her, and Laurel dries the last of her tears, drawing her legs up beneath her and crossing them. And he might be imagining that it’s a cue, his mind making it into one because he so desperately wants it to be, but he gets to his feet and sinks down onto the bed beside her – not too close, but close enough for her to feel him, take whatever comfort his presence can provide.

Even if it’s none at all. Even if he’ll always just be a sorry replacement for a ghost. Even if she never wants him again, kicks him out after tonight and tells him to never come back. He feels this powerful need just to _be with_ her, not speaking, not fucking, just existing in the same space, breathing the same air.

He remembers the night she waited for him outside the office, after the police found Sam’s body and she was convinced they were all about to be hauled off to jail for the rest of their lives. He remembers how she’d refused to let him comfort her because she was upset, how he’d just stood there with her instead in the middle of the driveway, comforted her that way. The Laurel sitting beside him now is no different, still with all those walls he might always exist on the outside of, closed off and afraid and wanting comfort but not knowing how to go about accepting any.

If he comforted her like that once, he knows he can do it again. He remembers how.

“I can go,” he offers, giving her an out if she wants one, but she shakes her head.

“No. I…” Laurel sniffs, tugging her cardigan tighter around herself. “I need someone.”

Someone. Not him specifically. Anyone would suffice, and the phrasing isn’t lost on him. He wonders for a moment if that will forever be his fate: existing as a stand-in for her, a nameless, faceless entity, a late-night call when she needs comfort and doesn’t particularly care who she gets it from.

Only because she wants _someone_. Never because she wants _him_.

But then there’s her voice again, soft and shaky, murmuring three little words; not the ones he’s just given her, but ones that upend his universe all the same:

“I need you.”

It’s a soft admission, one she barely gives enough volume to make into a whisper, and he’s stunned she’s even willing to admit it at all – but he can feel the burden she bears, and he knows he’s the only one who bears it too. All Frank does in the end is nod, silently accepting as he lets the words linger in the air, blanket both of them. They don’t speak any more or move in closer; they don’t need to, not really. They just sit, side by side, taking refuge in the silence and letting it speak for them.

He couldn’t say for certain how long they sit there. It could be hours, minutes, an eternity within a few seconds, but he doesn’t care. He’s grateful for anything.

He’s with her, and that’s all he wants to be.


End file.
